Photo by Wiebke Schroeder
Teaching Product Design in Accra, Ghana, 2015
Teaching an Arduino class at Foshan University, 2012
With Fiona Raby, NSCAD, 2017
With Foshan University colleagues, Shenzhen Industrial Design Fair, 2017
Michael LeBlanc
Michael B. LeBlanc is an Associate Professor in the Division of Design at NSCAD University, Halifax, Canada. First appointed to NSCAD in 1990, he holds an Hon. BA from the University of Guelph and an MFA from York University, where he concentrated on drawing and printmaking. He's an interdisciplinary designer with interests in web, user interface design, physical computing and product design.
He is the author of “Nothing Uninteresting”, a monograph of Canadian designer Eric Aldwinckle.
From 2000 to 2016 he served the Division of Design as Chair for 15 years and Director of the Master of Design program for two years. Over the years he's held Creative Director positions at several Halifax-based start-ups, including ITC Learning, PhotoPoint, Knowledge House, and Origin BioMed.
In addition to his teaching activities in Canada, he's taught design in Ghana and holds an official position as Visiting Professor at Foshan University, China. He is also Academic Advisor to Masters Design Lab based in London, UK.
CURRENT RESEARCH AND/OR CREATIVE PRACTICE
Over the course of his career, his main focus has been on UI/UX, working in web-based and 3D design. In 2020, with Prof. Yasushi Akiyama of Saint Mary’s University, he was awarded a $100k Mitacs Accelerate grant to investigate solutions to the problem of medication adherence in elderly patients. The grant, titled “Medication Adherence Using HomeEXCEPT’s Non-Intrusive Monitoring Platform” was granted to fund 8 NSCAD MDES and SMU Master of Computer Science interns.
In 2023, he completed a series of 100 sequential fine art drawings, documented in the book “Someone for Everything”.