IIT Institute of Design (ID) is dedicated to humanizing technology and improving the process of innovation by developing and teaching a more methodological and human-centered approach to design. While most new products and services today are created in response to technology, marketing, or design trends—leading to a dizzying array of consumer choices that complicate our lives—we believe that real innovation starts with users' needs and employs a set of reliable methods, theories and tools to create solutions to their problems.
As a newer profession, with its roots in arts and crafts, design historically has not had a body of fundamental theories and frameworks to underlie and support its practice. Unlike other professions like law, medicine, and business management, this paradigm means most knowledge about design practice is informal, contained in the talent and intuition of respected elders and "star" designers.
Since at least the 1950s, one of the Institute of Design's goals has been to formalize the body of knowledge of design so that it can be extended more broadly and understood more clearly by non-practitioners. In 1991, with support from the GE Foundation, we created the country's first PhD in design program as a way to further this goal. In our classes and research, both at the doctoral and master level, ID continues to develop and refine frameworks and theories of design.
A primary role of design is to bring technology into a human context and provide interface mechanisms between technological artifacts and human users. Much of our work encompasses interaction design, from its cognitive and physical foundations to basic models, methods and principles, user studies, scenario-based design, and context sensitivity.
As the boundary between physical products and media continues to blur, interaction between human and machine will take place on many new levels. Central to our point of view is that interaction design methods not be limited to media (web design, for example), but should also be applied to physical products, environments, services, and complex systems.
Organizations routinely use prototypes to embody and test ideas that they hope to develop into successful products and services. Traditionally, prototyping activities have been focused on physical product development. Recently, low-fidelity prototyping has emerged as a way to quickly understand and support the development of interactive products. Experiential prototyping has developed as a way to understand the nature of someone's experience as new technologies or services are introduced.
Prototyping is clearly a useful activity, yet it remains steeped in a craft tradition. Little is understood specifically about how prototypes work. In fact, the use of prototypes is so common that studying them seems odd to the community of practitioners.
A surprisingly frequent lament among C-level executives at global companies goes something like, "My company knows how to make anything; we just don't know what to make." As businesses have become more sophisticated with technology and management processes, they have indeed become able to make almost anything.
But as daily life becomes saturated with technology, what do customers actually want? This is the strength of strategic design: bridging the "what to make" gap by discovering users' needs and translating them effectively into new offerings.
Our work in this area investigates the successful application of design methods, skills, and thinking to business problems related to competitiveness and organic growth. Topics include the design planning skill set, connecting shareholder value and user value, how design can mitigate strategic risk in corporations, the role of design planning in early-stage ventures, and tools that can increase collaboration between generative and analytical thinkers.
Understanding users is a prerequisite for developing valuable, and valued, design concepts. From creating a research plan to finding participants to choosing and executing research methods in the context of a specific design project, an increasing number of tools, methods, and approaches exist for observing and analyzing human behavior and needs to inform the design process.
A few of our interests in this area include ethnographic interview techniques adapted for design, video and photo documentary, immersion, participant-aided data gathering, prototype-assisted observation, and methods for organizing data, finding patterns, and distilling insights that lead to actionable and inspiring design directives.
As the sub-discipline of user research becomes larger and more important to the design field, we continue to focus on building and expanding this area of study. For the past nine years, ID has hosted the Design Research Conference, the largest design-focused user research event in the US, as well as many smaller colloquia and workshops.
Visualizing complex information is one of our main areas of interest in communication design. It is also highly relevant for research, planning, and product design activities as an approach to dealing with large, rich sets of user research data, design criteria, and other information involved in the design process.
