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

In the Loop: Felix Köbler

November 19, 2013
12:30-2:00pm CST
IIT Institute of Design, 6th floor
350 N LaSalle St
Chicago, IL 60654

BahnScout A Mobile Crowdsourcing Application for Nuisance Reporting in Public Transportation Towards Designing for Interpersonal Persuasion on a Massive Urban Scale


BahnScout is a mobile crowdsourcing application that allows passengers to report problems and defects in public transportation infrastructures and to receive feedback by the operator and authorities. Felix Köbler will share insights on the chosen participatory and user-centered design approach in the development of BahnScout, highlighting conceptual challenges of gamification and persuasion.


Felix will also showcase potential areas of future research to better understand interpersonal persuasion in the context of systems that are designed on a massive urban scale to promote sustainable lifestyles or enable citizens to positively impact their environments.


About Felix


Felix Köbler is a PhD candidate and has been working as a research assistant at the Chair for Information Systems of Technische Universität München. He received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Information Systems from Technische Universität München and conducted internships with multiple international companies. His teaching and research areas include social networking sites, persuasive technologies, mobile und ubiquitous computing, gamification, crowdsourcing and global distributed software engineering. His research has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction and presented at major international conferences. Currently, he works as a strategic and user experience consultant for FELD M GmbH and is co-founder of BahnScout, a mobile crowd-sourcing application and solution.

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