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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PhD Research Seminar

PhD Research Seminar

This course is a ‘full court’ seminar in which all doctoral students are invited and encouraged to participate and support doctoral research.

Objective & Outcomes

The purpose of this doctoral seminar is to stimulate critical, constructive and generous discussion of PhD students’ research and writing in progress, to continue cultivating a lively and supportive intellectual design research community. 

Investigation and discussion by faculty and students of topics of interest from different perspectives such as building a design research discourse (reading research papers critically, selecting among publication venues); investigating alternative philosophical bases for design research (comparing empirical, pragmatic, and phenomenological approaches); or exploring methodological and theoretical conflicts in design research.

Upon completion of the course, students will have a better understanding of their research arguments and progress on building their dissertation.

Typical Schedule

  • Session 1: Introduction to Class
  • Session 2: Framing Research Questions
  • Session 3: Framing Research Questions
  • Session 4: Positioning Arguments
  • Session 5: Positioning Arguments
  • Session 6: Crafting Warrants
  • Session 7: Crafting Warrants
  • Session 8: Research Statement Structuring
  • Session 9: Research Statement Structuring
  • Session 10: Analogy, Metaphor & Simplifying Devices
  • Session 11: Analogy, Metaphor & Simplifying Devices
  • Session 12: Storyboarding Arguments
  • Session 13: Storyboarding Arguments

See all MDes Courses