Farewell Fred, Welcome Abbe!

After ten years, Fred Leichter has stepped down as the Executive Director of the Hive. The Hive team is immensely grateful for all that he has ideated, prototyped, and implemented during his tenure. Here’s a message co-written by Fred and Pomona’s President, Gabi Starr, celebrating his accomplishments:

“At the Hive, Fred has worked to ensure that everyone feels welcome—those with design backgrounds and those trying something creative for the first time. Students stepping into the Hive’s space are immediately greeted by signs that declare ‘Yes, you can!’ Fred will be the first to tell you that the most joyful part of his job is working with the amazing students here. And Fred’s students have found their experiences at the Hive to be similarly joyful, mind-expanding, and even life-changing. Former students recall:

‘When I’d go to the Hive, I’d run into people from all over. It’s an intersection. It’s where the overlap happens.’

‘It takes a lot of effort to create what you’ve created at the Hive, and I really appreciated the way you led our class with such kindness and curiosity for what your students could imagine.’

‘Human-centered design gave me the tools to become who I’m meant to be.’

Fred has been instrumental in developing human-centered design courses in Claremont, and I’m thrilled that students will continue to benefit from his combination of expertise and generosity as an educator this coming year. We at Pomona and across The Claremont Colleges are deeply grateful for what Fred has built and look forward to the next chapter as he continues to build the human-centered design curriculum and mentor students. He also plans to continue helping other colleges and universities develop their own creativity programs. We wish him every success in these future endeavors.”

Fred, thank you for all of your hard work and dedication to the Hive, its team, and its community. We’re glad you’re continuing your work here as an inspiring HCD professor and are excited to see what comes next for you.

We’re excited to announce that, on July 1st, Abbe Don (PO ‘83) started as the Interim Director of the Hive. Abbe is an experienced design strategist who has worked across the design industry at places such as Apple and IDEO. Her career is fueled by a passion for storytelling, the throughline connecting her professional journey and design process.

As a photography and writing major, Abbe created an interactive book inspired by the non-linear way her great-grandmother told stories. “When I visited her, she had a scrapbook with a lot of material in it,” Abbe recalls. “The pages folded and unfolded, revealing different layers below them, like photos with newspaper articles tucked behind them. She’d take it out, tell the story, fold it back up. The design of the book follows that layering model.”

After graduating, Abbe began thinking seriously about how to represent that kind of storytelling in her own medium. The answer arrived in 1984, when she encountered her first touchscreen kiosk. “That technology, combined with my ideas about storytelling, is going to be my medium,” she remembers thinking. “It was a moment of ‘aha’ intuition.” She went on to receive a Master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and interned at Apple’s Human Interface Group, an experience that launched her career in Human-Computer Interaction. Helping to define the field of Human Computer Interaction solidified her identity as an Experience Designer: someone who designs not only interfaces and screens but also entire customer experiences.

That work eventually led her to designing within healthcare. “I was doing service design, particularly around patient experience within large health systems,” she says. “How does someone move through a large health system, and how do you make that as patient-centered as possible?” Her focus extended to people living with chronic or terminal conditions, as well as the caregivers and family members supporting them.

Now, Abbe brings that depth of experience to the Hive. A guiding question shapes her process: “First, you need to design and build the right thing, and then you need to design and build it right. A significant part of the process is asking, are we even working on the right thing?” For her, human-centered design is the tool for finding that answer. “It’s about looking at real problems in the world, understanding their larger context, looking for opportunities for innovation, and then launching experiments that lead to change.”

Abbe’s plans for the Hive start with strengthening what already makes it special: a welcoming, diverse, generative community at the Claremont Colleges. Looking ahead, she hopes even more students–regardless of major or prior experience–can be part of the Hive, developing creativity and entrepreneurial mindsets to identify root causes of pressing human challenges, collaborate across disciplines, harness emerging technologies responsibly, and create effective change.

Written by Reese Rosebeck, Abbe Don, Fred Leichter, and Gabi Starr