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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Principles & Methods of User Research

Principles & Methods of User Research

Introduces the principles and methods of user research for design.

Objective & Outcomes

This course will introduce the principles and methods of user research by drawing on the fields of anthropology and design as well as the intersection between these fields. This course will also engage with emerging social theories about the nature of human experience and notions of the “user” that are transforming the field of design including: the nonhuman (machine and animal users), users as participants, non-users and multiple subjectivities.

Upon completion of the course, students will be broadly conversant in techniques of user research, able to describe the role of user research in different phases of the design process, and identify appropriate user research techniques suited to their design goals. Students will understand best practices and demonstrate how to integrate user research techniques to inform an effective, goal-driven user research study design.  

Typical Schedule

  • Session 1: Introduction
  • Session 2: Ethnographic Techniques
  • Session 3: Interviews & Focus Groups
  • Session 4: Contextual Inquiry
  • Session 5: Projectives & Card Sorting
  • Session 6: Experience Sampling & Remote Research
  • Session 7: Surveys
  • Session 8: Usability Testing
  • Session 9: Research Design
  • Session 10: Data Analysis & Translation
  • Session 11: Synthesis
  • Session 12: Co-Design
  • Session 13: Nonhuman Users & Non-Users
  • Session 14: Final Presentations

See all MDes Courses