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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Critical Contexts

Critical Contexts

A critical survey of key and reoccurring contextual paradigms that designers must consider.

This course is not available for the upcoming semester. Consult with your advisor for similar options.

Objective & Outcomes

This course will survey a selection of theories, ideas, and concepts that form the basis for understanding ourselves, the category of “the human,” and the world that we live in. This course will address themes such as materiality, temporality, and power as well as categories such as gender, race, class, disability, sexuality, decoloniality, and the multispecies. As design moves away from traditional domains such as images and objects and towards the creation of socio-technical systems, it is essential that designers build a rich vocabulary to discuss these complex relationships.

Upon completing the course, students can evaluate, articulate, and critique design’s social, cultural, ethical, legal, health, environmental, political, and economic implications. Students will also creatively and generatively build their own points of view about the nature of complex socio-technical systems.

Typical Schedule

  • Session 1: Making & Design Theory
  • Session 2: Time, Temporality and Long Futures
  • Session 3: Space, Place, Materiality and the Digital
  • Session 4: Power, Politics and Publics
  • Session 5: Maintenance, Repair and Care
  • Session 6: Making & Diverse Economies

See all MDes Courses