Five students from IIT Institute of Design took top honors as well as the people’s choice award at the 2012 Rotman Design Challenge, held in Toronto in March. Competing against 22 teams of MBA and design students from schools such as MIT, University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business, OCAD University, and California College of Arts, the ID students’ concept for developing better financial habits addressed this year’s challenge to maximize business value through social innovation. 

Team members Jorge Angarita, Lauren Braun, John Shin, Helen Wills, and Janice Wong, all first-year Master of Design students, spent seven ...

Kristine Angell, a Master of Design/BMA candidate ('12), and Kristi Leach, a past IIT student, won first place in the Chicago Innovation Awards student competition hosted by IIT Stuart School of Business.

Students who entered the competition needed to identify a population with an obvious and sizable need, develop a solution, and prove that their solution would greatly alleviate that need.

Jobber, Kristine and Kristi's concept, is a web applicaiton that helps long-term job seekers manage their searches.  They have submitted their concept to an incubator and are seeking resources to launch Jobber as a viable product in ...

A team of IIT Institute of Design graduate students (David Kodinsky, Tuduyen Annie Nguyen, Will Skelton, Parminder Kaur, Yu Yin) recently had their research paper accepted to the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2012). DIS is a premier arena for designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers to come together, debate, and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice. The ID student team designed and prototyped a public interactive installation at the Design Research Conference 2011 to explore the use of gaming in encourage philanthropic giving, as part of the Communication Design Workshop taught by ...

For 100 years, Steelcase has mined for human insights, and to celebrate their birthday, they gathered dreams of what the next century may look and fell like.  100 Minds from Around the World

Current MDM student Jose Mello's article "Service Design Creates Breakthrough Cultural Change in the Brazilian Financial Market" was published in the January 2012 issue of Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design.  The article focuses on building an innovation culture.  His team's approach created scores of advocates of the innovation process across the organization, sparking a whole new mindset.

Design Public Health Initiatives with Users in Mind

Whether drafting a plan to help patients make healthier food choices or designing an electronic medical records system, the more public health professionals know about the personal preferences of those who will use the end product, the more likely the initiative will be successful, Patrick Whitney told an overflow audience for the Dean's Distinguished Lecture Series at Harvard School of Public Health on January 17, 2012. 

View a webcast of the lecture.  Read the full article.

Professor Patrick Whitney, dean of IIT Institute of Design, spoke at a Smart Salon in January 2012 and shared the top 10 ways that companies commit innovation suicide. These include “wanting to innovate as long as it does not involve change” and “not knowing perfection is the enemy of success.”

Professor Whitney was joined by panelists Richard Whitehall of Smart Design and Steve Smith, a venture capitalist with more than 25 years of experience in the field.

Smart Salons, presented by Smart Design, are events held at all their studios that are open to the public and are centered around ...

In a review of the book Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid, Tom Murphy of The Huffington Post discusses IIT Institute of Design Dean Patrick Whitney’s chapter, in which he provides a case of “patient innovation” in Indian manufacturing.

Current Institute of Design students, Derek Tarnow and Zahra Tashakorinia have already raised over $100,000-- ten times their Kickstarter goal--for the TidyTilt kickstand, wall mount and earbud organizer for iPhone. Now Wired magazine is featuring the product in their GadgetLab section. The super nifty magnetic back cover comes in four colors and can be pre-ordered for $19 by donating to the Kickstarter fundraising effort. 

Lawrence Abrahamson and Marco Cimatti published "Writing on the Wall: Facilitating Organisational Change Through Model Co-Creation" in The Journal of Service Design. The piece details their process for helping Chicago Park District’s Judd Goldman Sailing Program re-envision their service offering through chalk talks and inviting stakeholders into the co-creation of an experience model.