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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Digital Media

Digital Media

Explore current and emerging methods and tools to develop ideas into interactive and dynamic prototypes.

“
Our training may be as engineers and scientists, but we must also see ourselves as wizards and artists, enchanters and storytellers, psychologists and behaviorists.
—David Rose

Objective & Outcomes

This course teaches current and emerging electronics and programmatic prototyping tools, so that students are able to fluently develop their ideas into interactive and responsive outcomes. Each semester, a different interaction design topic and technology prototyping platform—such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or Unity—is chosen to facilitate student design goals. An assortment of complementary product and interaction design skills is covered as well including soldering, CAD and, 3D printing for prototyping electronics enclosures, interacting with web services and data APIs, and conversations about intellectual property, ownership, and distribution concepts relevant to prototyping designs and creating interactive media, and emerging issues in integrating AI into designed experiences.

The course is highly experimental, with week-to-week exercises, readings and discussions to cultivate and refine technical skills, as well as time and support for students to work within an open final design brief. 

Typical Schedule

  • Session 1: Introduction to Microcontrollers, Electricity & Coding in Python
  • Session 2: Simple Circuits
  • Session 3: Sensing Intention
  • Session 4: Sensing Environments
  • Session 5: Sensing Movement & Proximity
  • Session 6: Sensing Sound & Image
  • Session 7: Displays & Screens
  • Session 8: Interacting with APIs & AIs
  • Session 9: Soldering & CAD for Enclosures
  • Session 10: Project Work Time
  • Session 11: Project Work Time
  • Session 12: Project Work Time

See all MDes Courses