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: Smiljana Antonijević

April 8, 2014
12:30-2:00pm CST
IIT Institute of Design
350 N La Salle St
6th floor, Chicago

Designing Digital Research Tools


Scholarly work across disciplines is increasingly digital, prompting transformations of research practices, assumptions, and methods. A design challenge that stands out in this encounter between academic knowledge production and digital technologies is designing digital research tools. Drawing on results of a three-year ethnographic study, this presentation discusses the following questions:
 



  • What are the challenges of designing digital research tools as epistemic tools?

  • What are the preferred features of digital research tools?

  • What kind of influence do scholars have on design of digital research tools?



This study was conducted in twenty-three academic institutions in Europe and the US as part of the research projects of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Oxford Internet Institute, and Penn State University. Through case studies, surveys, observations, and in-depth interviews with researchers, graduate students, program leaders, librarians, IT engineers, policy makers, and funders, the study provided insights into epistemological, methodological, technical, educational, organizational, and other key issues in contemporary digital scholarship.


Smiljana Antonijević is an associate researcher at eHumanities Group of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Andrew W. Mellon research anthropologist at Penn State University. In the academic year 2013-14, she is a visiting researcher at IIT Institute of Design. Smiljana’s research brings ethnographic methods and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to the study of digital scholarship, affective computing, embodiment in virtual environments, and other subjects in the field of digital culture. Her forthcoming book, Amongst Digital Humanists: An ethnographic study of digital knowledge production, will appear in the winter of 2014. Smiljana holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Communication, and Internet Studies from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

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