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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Politics of Design

Politics of Design

An overview of how designs and design activities exert political agency.

This course is not available for the upcoming semester. Consult with your advisor for similar options.
“
Designers constantly make choices about which users to privilege and which will have to do more work…the point is that these decisions need to be made explicit.
—Sasha Costanza-Chock

Objective & Outcomes

During this course, students will explore the interrelationship of the politics of design across individuals, practices, and policies and the arrangements of power and authority between actors (human and non-human) in society. To design is to perform an ideological and political act that has the power to fundamentally shape societies and systems. And yet, design utilizes methodologies that possess an illusion of neutrality situated outside of a societal or systemic context. Students will explore topics such as how design decisions affect the distribution of resources and opportunities and how designers might create a just world.

Upon completing the course, students will be able to understand their own identities as nested within many other ideologies and systems. Through a practice of self-reflexivity as a designer and co-creator, they will be able to evaluate and challenge how design exerts politics and power through its creation of “preferred situations.”

Typical Schedule

  • Session 1: Introduction
  • Session 2: Sense Making: How do we make sense of inequities that lead to power asymmetries?
  • Session 3: Meaning Making: How do the methodologies of design shape power relations?
  • Session 4: Choice Making: What decisions can designers make by clarifying affordances?
  • Session 5: Value making: Where can designers challenge biases and redirect power asymmetries?
  • Session 6: Impact Making: How might prioritizing justice work to counter oppression?
  • Session 7: Final Critique

See all MDes Courses