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.

institute
of desiGn
Search
Faculty

Ruth Schmidt Pushes Behavioral Design Toward Complex Challenges

Expanded thinking about the hybrid field of behavioral design

April 13, 2022

Oat milk decision

Associate professor Ruth Schmidt has been sharing her ideas, models, and work related to behavioral design and the direction of the field.

As she and co-author Sarah Reid write in their article, “Wicked Behavioral Problems” in the Journal of Design Strategy:

“
We have the potential to reposition behavioral design from a reactive discipline, correcting for biases and bottlenecks that are already occurring, to a proactive one located further upstream, which reframes what we're even solving for and informs policy development.

In Behavioral Public Policy, Ruth examines how policy practitioners could go beyond the model of choice architecture to considering choice infrastructure, which allows them to apply systems thinking to complex public policy challenges. Considering choice infrastructures—the systems and conditions at play in a given situation—helps “choice architecture solutions work effectively and as planned.”

And in The Decision Lab podcast, she brings these ideas together:

“
So much of where [behavioral design] earned its credibility as a field has been in being able to think small, not big. It’s actually been a longstanding issue: how we can apply these insights to larger problems? If we don’t consider the conditions that we’re designing into and we don’t, as a field, get really, really good at considering how we can create conditions that aren’t just about individual point solutions—especially at an organizational level, what we’re designing into and how we can support and enable really good choice architecture—we’re really only solving part of the challenge. It’s in some ways a natural evolution of what the field is good at and how to expand upon that.

Hear more from Ruth on Wednesday, April 20 at noon CT in “Designing Decision-making: A Conversation about Behavioral Design,” when she discusses behavioral design with ID alum Asmina Shaikh, Senior Behavioral Designer at McKinsey & Company, in a Zoom conversation suited for those new to the field.

Related

Positive Sum Design panel

Ruth Schmidt and Will Rutter Discuss Positive Sum Design

Asmina Sheikh

Asmina Shaikh, Senior Behavioral Designer at McKinsey & Company

Ruth Schmidt Provides a New Framework for Behavioral Designers