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
Technology

Qi

February 18, 2015

Students were challenged to understand connected items in a new way, the team decided to explore how a threshold device could improve work-life balance from the perspective of a worker.

Assignment

Students were given the opportunity to practice methods for design research, concept development, and rapid prototyping of communication design solutions. They explored a variety of communication design outlets such as traditional communication media, new communication media, multimodal communications, spatial communication, communication systems, urban communication, and networked objects. Teams discussed the theory, philosophy, technology, and implementation of such media in the real world to solve design problems.

Synopsis

A threshold device is anything that allows a person to experience the “there” from the “here.” It could be a window, a photograph, or even a story. More frequently, they are the digital communication tools we use on a daily basis.

Within the very broad challenge of “understand threshold devices in a new way,” the team decided to explore how a threshold device could improve work-life balance from the perspective of a worker.

Faculty

Tags:

Students

Yasuhiro Sasaki
Jennifer Sculley
SeungCheol Lee
Anita Lee