6 required courses · 13.5 credits · Foundation of your design identity at IIT
The foundational research course for everything you'll do at IIT. You'll learn how to plan, conduct, and synthesize design research — interviews, observation, ethnography, surveys, and field studies. The methods you learn here unlock IDN 522 Research Synthesis later, so take it first semester without question.
"This is the most important course you'll take first semester. Everything downstream — context, synthesis, design decisions — starts here. If you're strong in research, you're strong in everything."
Context is everything in civic design. Before you can design for a community, a government service, or a public system — you have to deeply understand the environment that design will live in. This course teaches contextual inquiry: how to read a situation, map stakeholders, understand power dynamics, and identify the invisible forces shaping people's lives.
"Your 20 years of observing the world as a designer is your advantage here. You already see things most students haven't learned to see yet. Trust that — and then learn the formal language to communicate what you see."
The bridge between research and design. Once you've gathered research and understood context, you still have a room full of information and no design yet. Analysis + Synthesis teaches you to make sense of complexity — to find patterns, build frameworks, and turn messy data into clear design directions. This is where designers earn their keep.
"Take this second semester, after IDN 508. You'll have real research to synthesize. Students who take it before doing research often struggle to understand what they're synthesizing. Sequence matters."
The most philosophical course in your required set. It asks: what does it mean to experience something as a human? How do perception, memory, emotion, culture, and environment shape how people move through the world? It's theoretical — heavy on reading, discussion, and written response — but it gives your design decisions a deeper grounding than most designers ever develop.
"This course will feel hard at first if you've never read philosophy. Don't panic. The key is to stay curious and connect every abstract idea back to something you've actually designed or experienced. Your life is the case study."
How to communicate design decisions to people who aren't designers — executives, government officials, community members, funders. Civic design lives or dies on communication. You can have the best research and the strongest design in the room, but if you can't frame it in a way that moves people to act, it doesn't matter. This course teaches you that framing.
"This is where your professional experience becomes a direct advantage. Most of your classmates have never had to sell a design decision to a client or a skeptic. You've done it for decades."
Cities, governments, transit systems, healthcare systems, schools — these are all systems. Systems theory gives you the vocabulary and the mental models to understand how complex things work, why they fail, and where small interventions can create large change. This is the intellectual foundation of civic design. Without it, you're designing features. With it, you're designing for change.
"This course will make everything else click. The reason you want to combine design with public policy is exactly what systems theory explains — you can't design a good service inside a broken system. Now you'll have the language to prove it."
Choose one · 4 credits · The most intensive course in the program
Design that starts with the body — how humans move through, feel, and inhabit space and objects. Embodied Design pushes you beyond screens and into physical, tactile, and spatial design thinking. For a civic designer, this means understanding how policy is felt in a body — the experience of waiting in a government office, navigating a broken transit system, or sitting in a courtroom. It expands your vocabulary as a designer in ways that pure UX work never will.
"This is where your identity as a designer gets tested and expanded. It's the most demanding course in the program — but students who lean into it, rather than just surviving it, come out with a design voice that's genuinely their own."
How information flows and how design shapes that flow. Communication Systems looks at design not as a single artifact but as a system of messages, channels, and meaning-making. Given your visual background — 20 years of graphic and UI design — this studio may feel like the most natural fit. But it will push you well beyond aesthetic craft into systemic thinking about how communication works at scale.
"Given your visual strength, this studio is where your past 20 years become a direct asset. But don't coast on aesthetics — the studio will push you to think about communication as a system, not a surface."
8 required courses · 24 credits · Stuart School of Business · Evenings
The map of the territory. Before you can design for government, you have to understand how government actually works — its structure, its incentives, its constraints, and its culture. This course gives you that map: federal, state, and local government structures, how public agencies function, how decisions get made, and why government services so often fail the people they're meant to serve.
"Take this first semester. It's the easiest MPA course and the most clarifying. You've lived inside government systems as a veteran and VA patient — this course will give you the language to explain what you already know from experience."
Design doesn't happen in a vacuum — it happens inside organizations, and organizations are made of people with incentives, cultures, fears, and habits. Organizational Behavior teaches you how people behave in institutional contexts: how leadership works, why change is resisted, how culture forms, and how to navigate the human side of systems. For a civic designer, this is essential — because your designs will need to be adopted by government employees who didn't ask for them.
"Your Army experience is directly relevant here. You've lived inside one of the most complex organizations in the world. You understand command culture, bureaucratic resistance, and what happens when leadership fails people on the ground."
How public sector organizations recruit, develop, manage, and retain people. Less directly relevant to design than your other courses, but it gives you a critical lens: public sector services fail not just because of bad design, but because of workforce issues — understaffed agencies, demoralized employees, poor training, misaligned incentives. Understanding HR in government means understanding one of the root causes of service failure.
"Use this course to understand the human infrastructure behind every public service you'll ever design for. The form at the DMV was designed by someone. The wait time at the VA clinic is a workforce problem. HR is design at the organizational level."
Government runs on budget. Every design decision you'll ever propose in a civic context will be evaluated against a budget. This course teaches you how public money works — how it's allocated, how it's tracked, how it's optimized, and how to make a financial case for investment in design. It's the most quantitative MPA course you'll take outside of the modeling courses.
"Your VR&E case taught you something important: money and policy are inseparable. This course will give you the vocabulary to sit in a budget meeting and speak the same language as the people who control whether your design ever gets funded."
Quantitative methods for making better policy decisions. How do you allocate limited resources across competing needs? How do you optimize a government service delivery system? This course uses mathematical and analytical tools — linear programming, decision analysis, optimization models — to answer those questions. It's the most technically demanding MPA course and the furthest from your comfort zone. Plan accordingly.
"You loved math and biology as a student. That part of your brain still works — it just needs to be reactivated. The design thinking you use every day is actually a form of optimization: constraints, tradeoffs, best solution given real limits. This course is the formal version of what you already do."
How do you know if a policy or program actually worked? How do you predict whether a proposed intervention will succeed? This course teaches you the tools of program evaluation and policy forecasting — how to design studies that measure impact, how to interpret evidence, and how to communicate findings to decision-makers. For a civic designer, this is how you prove your work matters.
"This course connects directly to your design research skills. Evaluating a policy program uses the same fundamental thinking as evaluating a design — did it change the behavior we intended? Did it serve the people it was meant for? You already think this way."
The most demanding course in the MPA program. Economic modeling applied to policy design — how economists think about designing incentives, predicting behavior, and modeling the effects of policy interventions before they're implemented. Think of it as systems thinking with mathematical precision. It will stretch you further than any other course in the program.
"This is the course where most design students feel most out of their depth. That's okay. You don't need to become an economist — you need to understand economic logic well enough to have a credible conversation with one. That's the goal."
The capstone of your MPA. A real placement inside a public sector organization where you apply everything you've learned. This is where the dual degree pays off most visibly — you show up as both a trained public administrator and a trained designer. Most practicum students are policy analysts. You can be a civic designer who understands policy. That combination is rare and valuable.
"This is the moment the whole program has been building toward. You walk into a real organization, with real stakes, and do real work. Everything else — the research methods, the systems theory, the budget analysis, the design studio — is preparation for this."
27.5 credits · Your most powerful design decision in the program
Electives are 40% of your MDes degree. They're where you build your specialization. The full catalog is below — organized by theme, with the courses most relevant to your civic design goals marked with ★★ (must-take) or ★ (strongly recommended). Rule: follow the faculty who challenge you, not just the title.
★★ Must-take for civic design goals · ★ Strongly recommended · Not all courses offered every semester — confirm with adviser · Up to 6cr may be taken outside ID with adviser approval