Welcoming the Institute of Design

Posted on August 23, 2016 by Emily Barney

This summer we rearranged our library space on the 6th and 7th floors to make room for the IIT Institute of Design. We’ve been looking forward to learning more from ID as we welcome them to our campus, and learning how their discipline offers unique insights into a changing world.

Design thinking was also a major theme at this year’s national AALL Meeting in Chicago, from the keynote presentation by Will Evans to the Chicago Public Library sessions describing how they’ve applied this type of research and practice to create new services and initiatives.

ID Open House 2016

Last Tuesday, ID offered their first open house at the Graduate Campus, giving history of the school, an alum’s overview of his career path, and highlights from recent academic research and student projects. See more details in the photo album below by clicking on any photo.

Assistant Dean Hugh Musik described the beginnings of ID from the initial Bauhaus school in Germany from 1919-1933, when it was closed due to opposition from the Nazi party.  László Moholy-Nagy came to Chicago in 1937 to found the “New Bauhaus,” the original name of the Institute of Design. A new Art Institute of Chicago exhibit on Nagy will open on October 2: Moholy-Nagy: Future Present

Musick described the transitions through the years as the school looked for ways to prepare students to tackle increasingly complicated questions and work with a wide variety of corporations and organizations to identify strategies that meet needs successfully. You can also find an interactive timeline of leadership & curriculum foci on the Institute of Design website

A packed room – they kept bringing in more chairs as guests continued to arrive.
prototype experiments and recent research projects were on display
Introducing the IIT Institute of Design Open House Fall 2016
Sharing a quote from Epictitus and the danger of not knowing what you don’t know as applied to business and beyond.
Describing his career path from a background in fine arts to the the IIT Institute of Design to his current role as diretor of INSITUM’s US Office at the Open House Fall 2016
Professor Ruecker described the academic research that ID students explore to offer tools that will help answer design questions across a wide variety of scenarios.
Displays of recent student work
An experiment based on recognizing linear timelines rarely match our personal perception of time or memory of experiences.
designed to make it easier to group concepts differently and recognized issues from different perspectives
Autonomous robotic environment patrol for large buildings
Exploring a way to present alternative voices and perspectives through video projection to viewers entering or leaving an event
model form
A flexible space that could block out sound, perhaps even cell phone signals, to create a private area for reflection
Thinking Inside the Box by Camila Moraes Leite, Gabriela Flores Orth, and Filipe Artur Honorato
Showing how an augmented relatity education tool could be used to build prototyping experiments into classroom curriculum
The concieved of a possible ‘HoloShop” that could be used by consumers who want to visualize how their potential purchases would look in their own living spaces using augmented reality goggles.
describing his autonomous robot
An autonomous robot designed to explore large buildings and collect information about structural and environmental issues using existing mobile apps with a phone on a selfie-stick. The robot is designed to utilize open-source tools as much as possible to allow for further development and broader applications with a wide range of users.

Design Thinking for Law Librarians

Will Evans gave this keynote talk at AALL 2016 national meeting of law librarians, discussing how design thinking could be applied to law libraries and the legal industry:


New Models of Purpose-Driven Exploration in Knowledge Work

The Chicago Public Library then demonstrated how this type of model has been applied locally within their system as they evaluated existing programs and experimented with new services. We don’t have their slides online, but I did live-tweet their events:

The Chicago Public Library materials have been organized into a toolkit for other libraries in the website “Design Thinking for Libraries,” funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation and created in collaboration with IDEO and the Aarhus Public Libraries in Denmark.

About Emily Barney

Technology Training & Marketing Librarian
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