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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Yuli Patrick Hsieh

Principal Research Scientist, ReconMR

Yuli Patrick Hsieh

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Dr. Y. Patrick Hsieh joined the Institute of Design as adjunct faculty in 2017 to teach Survey Methods, which offers hands-on learning experience in developing end-to-end survey projects with social science training applied to the contexts of product design, development cycles, and user experience.

Industry Experience

Patrick is an experienced mixed methods researcher with over 12 years of experience spanning UX research, large-scale social survey studies, and business intelligence. He specializes in developing fit-for-purpose research strategies that integrate qualitative and quantitative approaches, designing and directing mixed-methods research projects, creating online recruitment strategies to engage general, specialized, and hard-to-reach populations, crafting and testing survey instruments for individuals and establishments, and producing actionable data analytics to inform business decisions.

Following his PhD in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern University (2014), Patrick began his career at RTI International as a survey methodologist and digital sociologist, developing mixed-method research designs, traditional and web-based questionnaires, and integrating digital technologies such as mobile and social media into survey methodology to improve research design and data quality. His substantive research focuses on the implications of information and communication technologies for social relationships and digital inequalities in people’s social, psychological, and economic well-being.

Passionate about innovation in survey methodology, Patrick explores how emerging technologies and design thinking can expand the reach and relevance of research across disciplines. He currently serves as Principal Research Scientist at ReconMR, a full-service market research firm specializing in multimodal data collection, advanced analytics, and strategic insights. There, Patrick provides strategic guidance on research design and implementation, leads cross-functional teams to develop research proposals, supports senior leadership in business development, and helps clients uncover meaningful insights that inform decision-making.