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 Systems

Communication Systems

Investigates the elements, layout, and information structures in communication systems.

Objective & Outcomes

Through this course, students will investigate how shape, color, typographic choices, arrangement, dynamism, repetition, and layout affect the interpretability of information.  Students will consider how the creation of design systems, self-consistent sets of rules and decisions, can be applied to structure visual information for more effective, persuasive, accessible, and reusable design outcomes. Course focus varies by semester, and may include themes like branding, data visualization, generative AI, expressive typography, narrative illustration and motion graphics, and curatorial and educational materials.  

This course takes on these interrelated awareness, educational, and communication design challenges while building student skill sets in visualization strategies for complex systems. Students will complete projects focusing on finding, framing, and visualizing problems and opportunities within systemic contexts. At the same time, students will reflect on how the tools and methods we use change the ways we think and design.  

Typical Schedule

  • Session 1: Introduction to Topic
  • Session 2: Project #1
  • Session 3: Project #1
  • Session 4: Project #1
  • Session 5: Project #2
  • Session 6: Project #2
  • Session 7: Project #2
  • Session 8: Project #3
  • Session 9: Project #3
  • Session 10: Project #3
  • Session 11: Final Project
  • Session 12: Final Project
  • Session 13: Final Project
  • Session 14: Final Project
See all MDes Courses