In 2026, after nearly 90 years, the Institute of Design was folded into Illinois Tech's School of Design & Society.
This website is an archive of the impactful and inspirational work produced by the ID community before that transition.

László Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, treating design as a discipline that was teachable, testable, and consequential. Nine decades on, its scope had widened from the things people use to the systems they depend on: hospitals, government agencies, classrooms, supply chains, digital platforms. Along the way, ID community members developed the published research, methods, and frameworks that designers rely on every day.

Chief among them is human-centered design: close attention to how people actually live, and advocacy for what that research reveals. It shaped designers who are comfortable with complexity and ambiguity: curious, rigorous, inclusive, and stubbornly optimistic about design's ability to change the systems that shape our lives.

To every one of them, who taught, studied, built, critiqued, and stayed late in the studio: thank you, and keep designing.

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Bias & Sensemaking

Bias & Sensemaking

A deep dive into how to identify, mitigate, and design for the presence of individual, institutional and systems-level bias.

This course is not available for the upcoming semester. Consult with your advisor for similar options.
“
A spirit of emergent conversation; creating a truly open, compassionate space where we can talk about difficult topics and reveal personal biases. This is game changing!
—Former Student

Objective & Outcomes

The ability to recognize and manage bias is increasingly a necessary skill for designers. Bias is not itself good or bad, just a side effect of being human, but when it dictates things like who gets funded, what products get made, who gets to participate, and what data feeds all these decisions, it radically reduces our ability to solve problems effectively. Because bias shows up in many forms—personal, organizational, cultural, algorithmic, even in the very words we use—and is often “hidden in plain sight,” we need a range of tools and lenses to anticipate and address it. This class will explore the various ways in which bias shows up, recognize signals that indicate its presence, and practice approaches to de-bias decision making.

Upon completing this course, students will be equipped to better recognize different kinds of bias (e.g., personal, cultural, algorithmic) in everyday experiences or artifacts, and have an evolved point of view about how bias shows up in design activities and some new approaches to navigate or combat it.

Typical Schedule

  • Session 1: Introduction: What is bias?
  • Session 2: Normal: Is there such a thing?
  • Session 3: Difference: How we define & think of “other”
  • Session 4: Representation/Exclusion: Why what we see & make matters
  • Session 5: Power/Privilege: Algorithmic “objectivity” & institutional bias
  • Session 6: Reflective Practitioners: Biases inherent in disciplines, work & ways of thinking
  • Session 7: Responsible Makers: Recognizing biases in design & in practice

See all MDes Courses