Professor Thrush (l), Jay Brewer (c), Corey Thomas (l)

Corey Thomas, CEO of fast growing cybersecurity firm RAPID7, and his User Experience VPO, Jay Brewer, visited Professor George Thrush’s Understanding Design class this week. The course is offered to a wide range of Northeastern undergraduates from outside of the College of Arts, Media and Design, and they were deeply engaged in this particular presentation.

Thomas gave a brief talk on how design thinking had allowed him to reinvent the entire cybersecurity industry, by reimagining the problem. He brought Jay Brewer onboard from a background in user experience in online games, and together the two carefully observed how their customers worked, and thereby came to understand their cybersecurity problems much better than the clients did themselves. The core design thinking principles of empathy and problem definition have fueled explosive growth at the company, and provided further evidence of the centrality of design in today’s fast changing economy.