Ken Kaplan became a designer after an earlier career as a psychiatric social worker. This background gives him a unique perspective on how systems and people work and interact. His experience encompasses patient care; architectural design, teaching, writing, and research; and organizational design and systems research.

Ken is an integrator. He identifies and engages people and groups with similar goals, but often different perspectives or approaches, and brings them together to work toward cohesive solutions. Early in his career, Ken gained an inside view of health-care delivery during his 10 years as a clinical social worker. Since becoming a designer, he has devoted much of his time to health systems consulting and research at Columbia, Harvard, and MIT, most recently as a senior advisor to the MIT Sloan Initiative for Health Systems Innovation and to a DoD-funded analysis of the military behavioral health system.

Earlier at MIT, he co-led the New Models for Health Initiative, collaborating with leaders and clinicians across a wide range of health care organizations and developing design-based projects addressing stroke, childhood obesity, and behavioral health treatment systems. Previously, Ken was a Principal Research Scientist in the MIT Department of Architecture and Planning, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, where he was Co-Principal Investigator for the DoD-funded Surgical Room of the Future Project, and led a study investigating technology transfer from DOD to civilian healthcare.

Ken has held professorships at the graduate architecture schools of Columbia University and Harvard University, led design research at MIT, and lectured in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He received his MS in psychiatric social work from New York University and an MS in architecture and an MS in historic preservation from Columbia University.