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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Communication Design Workshop

Communication Design Workshop

Provides practice of research, development, and prototyping methods for communication design solutions.

Objective & Outcomes

This workshop allows students to practice methods for design research, concept development, and rapid prototyping of visual communication design solutions. The course explores a variety of communication design outlets, such as traditional communication media, new communication media, multimodal communications, spatial communication, communication systems, urban communication, and networked objects. Teams will discuss the theory, philosophy, technology, and implementation of such media in the real world to solve design problems.

Upon completing the course, students will demonstrate the ability to create communication design solutions resolving the problem by understanding contextual constraints and creating new potential solutions.

Typical Schedule

  • Session 1: Topic Onboarding
  • Session 2: Primary & Secondary Research: Analysis & synthesis
  • Session 3: Primary & Secondary Research: Analysis & synthesis
  • Session 4: Primary & Secondary Research: Analysis & synthesis
  • Session 5: Initial Prototyping
  • Session 6: Initial Prototyping
  • Session 7: Mid-Term Presentation
  • Session 8: Iterative Prototyping
  • Session 9: Iterative Prototyping
  • Session 10: Iterative Prototyping
  • Session 11: Iterative Prototyping
  • Session 12: Iterative Prototyping
  • Session 13: Iterative Prototyping
  • Session 14: Final Presentation

See all MDes Courses