Abstract: Minimal surfaces, that is surfaces with vanishing mean curvature, are amongst the surface classes best studied and understood. One of the reasons for this is the fact that a minimal surface in 3-space is the real part of a holomorphic function into complex 3-space, and thus the classical notions and facts from Complex Analysis can be used in the study of minimal surfaces. On the other hand, harmonic maps into appropriate spaces give rise to integrable systems. In particular, integrable system methods can be used to investigate surfaces given by a harmonicity condition. For example, constant mean curvature (CMC) surfaces have harmonic Gauss map and the associated family (for non-vanishing mean curvature) has been used to classify all CMC tori as meromorphic functions on an auxiliary Riemann surface given by the associated family, the spectral curve. In this talk, I will explain how some tools from integrable systems, i.e., the associated family and its dressing, give rise to well-known concepts of minimal surfaces. In particular, this indicates that results on minimal surfaces may be special cases of a more general integrable system theory for conformal immersions.