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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Ruth Schmidt Leads International Coalition to Track Hiring and Promotion Criteria

Project Receives $1.2M Grant from Arcadia to Accelerate Research Assessment Reform

September 16, 2021

Arcadia: Promoting Open Access
Associate professor Ruth Schmidt will co-lead an effort to create a new dashboard that will track hiring and promotion criteria in academic institutions. The project with DORA seeks to promote equity in academia.

DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment) was recently awarded a $1.2 million grant from Arcadia to identify and publicize the criteria that universities around the world use to hire and promote researchers.

“
Though many in the scholarly community remain fixated on papers, books, and grants as the usual indicators of 'success,' there is growing consideration of how scholarly work reaches and impacts the wider world.
—DORA blog

Schmidt will work with a globally diverse team that includes Stephen Curry, the Chair of DORA and Imperial College’s Assistant Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; Sarah de Rijcke, Professor in Science and Evaluation Studies and Director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University; and other DORA leaders and Leiden University researchers to create:

 

  • An interactive online dashboard that will track the criteria that academic institutions use for hiring, review, promotion, and tenure.
  • A survey of attitudes and approaches to research assessment reform across US academic institutions.
  • A toolkit of resources to support academic institutions working to improve policy and practice.

DORA facilitates the implementation of good practice in research assessment.

Specifically, Chris Woolston at Nature writes, “It calls for doing away with impact factors as a way to judge the merit of academics.”

DORA has been signed by more than 20,000 individuals and institutions around the world.

Related

Rethinking Research Assessment: Unintendended & Cognitive System Biases

Identifying Bias in Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure Decisions

DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment) logo

Rethinking Research Assessment

Windmills: Twenty questions about design behavior for sustainability

Want to build a sustainable future? Study designers, Nature Sustainability report says