by ROXANNE KNAPP, IIT Institute of Design The Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology is building thought leadership and practice around using design to innovate for humanity’s most pressing, confounding issues. The world faces daunting global challenges—complex, fast-changing, and unpredictable problems—that design strategy is uniquely poised to address. Our students explore how the practice of design is evolving in response to large-scale economic, social, and technical changes. Our faculty teach methods and frameworks that support an emerging kind of design, one in which designers coordinate relationships between systems and foster conditions in which ecologies can grow. For over a decade, ID graduate students curated the Design Research Conference, which brought together a growing community of design professionals advancing the role of design research in innovation. Then in 2014, a group of students saw an opportunity to re-envision the event, aligning it with the changing role of design and two...