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.

institute
of desiGn
Search

Multidisciplinary Innovation

Multidisciplinary Innovation

“
I really, really enjoyed the process of bringing our concept to life, and it was truly a design school experience. I loved that the instructor supported our craziness by helping us back it up with logic. It's easy to do blue sky thinking, but he helped us do it with realistic constraints. And that was great.
—Former student

Objective & Outcomes

As organizations face increasingly complex challenges and ambitions to innovate, their ability to collaborate across disciplines is no longer an option but a requirement. In this course, students will work with students from other disciplines around campus to learn firsthand about collaboration by engaging in design-led innovation methods to solve a real-world challenge provided by an outside organization. 

The course will include approximately 16 students from different departments across Illinois Tech, including Design, Business, Architecture, Science, Engineering, and Applied Technology. Students will learn to work with team members from different disciplines, approach a given project challenge from a multidisciplinary perspective, manage time and resources to complete a project, and present collaborative ideas to external stakeholders. 

Upon completing this course, students will be able to engage in primary and secondary research for design-led innovation, apply the balance breakthrough model to innovation projects, and build business and financial models for startup or innovation ideas.

Typical Schedule

  • Session 1: Context Setting
  • Session 2: Context Setting
  • Session 3: Research & Analysis
  • Session 4: Research & Analysis
  • Session 5: Research & Analysis
  • Session 6: Research & Analysis
  • Session 7: Mid-Term Review
  • Session 8: Mid-Term Review
  • Session 9: Synthesis
  • Session 10: Synthesis
  • Session 11: Synthesis
  • Session 12: Synthesis
  • Session 13: Storytelling
  • Session 14: Final Presentation

See all MDes Courses