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.

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Past Event

What would you do with a million tweets?

January 27, 2015
12:30-2:00pm CST
IIT Institute of Design, 6th floor
350 N LaSalle St
Chicago, IL 60654

Most of Libby Hemphill’s recent research uses tweets as a significant data source for understanding how social media shapes political discussion, how social media is used as an instrument of power, and how social media fits within the broader media landscape. In this talk, she’ll give a quick overview of what she’s done with a million tweets from politicians, television audiences, gamers, and activists and invite the audience to discuss what other research we could do with a million tweets. This exercise will help us understand the limits of social media data, challenge us to address the problems inclusion and representation researchers face when using social media data, and if we’re lucky, help us identify potential collaborations for future research.


About Libby


Libby Hemphill is an assistant professor of communication and information studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She earned her MS in human-computer interaction and PhD in information from the University of Michigan. Her recent work has focused on how users leverage Twitter to influence public and social policy. She is especially interested in how people people marshal information and communication technologies in service of social change and in the ethics and pragmatics of big social data.


Libby Hemphill will speak as part of "In the Loop", a lecture series on design, innovation and entrepreneurship organized by IIT Institute of Design faculty. The series engages a wide range of speakers that present on topics ranging from theoretical research and emerging methodologies that are relevant to the field of design as well as personal narratives and examples from current design practice.

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