This resource, which is part of the Carole and Gordon Segal Design Library Project, was made possible thanks to a generous gift from the Segal Family Foundation.

This website has a dual function: it is a searchable design document database and it is a site for collaborative research.

Design Document Database

The Institute of Design is building a design research community. Because design research is scattered within many disciplinary classifications and is often invisible and difficult to find, we assemble in this database resources that support the work we are doing. While our primary motive is to share these resources internally, to provide easy access and support for our ongoing interests, we also share this developing resource with the outside world as a stimulus for further research.

The database will continue to grow through the addition of documents and will develop further with the addition of new subsections. This database is part of the Segal Resource Center at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

Collaborative Research

This site is a product of collaborative research between IIT's Information Retrieval Laboratory, under the direction of Ophir Frieder, and IIT's Institute of Design, with Sharon Poggenpohl directing the design research.

The search engine powering this site is AIRE, which is designed to be highly flexible and extensible. AIRE successfully competed in the NIST (National Institute of Standards in Technology) TREC-9 (Text Retrieval) category, receiving a 1st in manual ad hoc competition and a 5th in automatic ad hoc.

Interface and interaction are human-centered research areas of interest at the Institute of Design. In the past, search behavior and its interface and interaction support have been investigated by disciplines separate from the discipline concerned with technical fidelity of search process and result. This site marks the beginning of an integrated approach in which understanding of user search strategy and technical generation of search support co-evolve.

   Update     Latest 09/18/02     Previous 03/27/01