In 2026, after nearly 90 years, the Institute of Design came under new management. 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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Past Event

Cross-Cultural User-Experience Design: Past, Present, and Future

March 5, 2015
6:00-8:00pm CST
IIT Institute of Design, 6th floor
350 N LaSalle St
Chicago, IL 60654

What are the principles of cross-cultural UX design? How can we use them to solve for different aspects of cross-cultural user experience analysis and design? Aaron Marcus, president of Aaron Marcus and Associates (AM+A), will share how he and his company are finding solutions to global design and communications problems as well as the company’s ongoing research comparing Chinese and Western UX design principles. His talk will showcase projects in which understanding cultural differences plays a critical role in usability and will include the presentation of concept designs that address localization.


About Aaron


Aaron Marcus is principal of Aaron Marcus and Associates (AM+A) in Berkeley, California, publisher of 15 books and 350 articles, frequent adjunct faculty at IIT Institute of Design, the first graphic designer in the world to work with computers (1967), the first professional visual designer of virtual reality (1969), one of the first designers to start a computer-based design firm (1982), a SIGGRAPH Pioneer of Computer Graphics, a pioneer of cross-cultural design for human-computer interface design (1993), an AIGA Fellow in the area of cross-cultural design, and a member of the distinguished CHI Academy.

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