In 2026, after nearly 90 years, the Institute of Design was folded into Illinois Tech's School of Design & Society.
This website is an archive of the impactful and inspirational work produced by the ID community before that transition.

László Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, treating design as a discipline that was teachable, testable, and consequential. Nine decades on, its scope had widened from the things people use to the systems they depend on: hospitals, government agencies, classrooms, supply chains, digital platforms. Along the way, ID community members developed the published research, methods, and frameworks that designers rely on every day.

Chief among them is human-centered design: close attention to how people actually live, and advocacy for what that research reveals. It shaped designers who are comfortable with complexity and ambiguity: curious, rigorous, inclusive, and stubbornly optimistic about design's ability to change the systems that shape our lives.

To every one of them, who taught, studied, built, critiqued, and stayed late in the studio: thank you, and keep designing.

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A Tribute to Chuck Owen

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Charles L. Owen, a systems design pioneer

By Kristin Gecan

October 22, 2019

Chuck Owen

Charles L. (Chuck) Owen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Design (ID), passed away on October 17, 2019. Chuck—who began teaching at ID in 1965 and retired in 2010—was a pioneer in the area of systems design, and dedicated his life to understanding and designing large-scale systems. His holistic approach to influencing systemic transformations have inspired generations of designers around the world.

Chuck Owen Memorial

Chuck’s impact on ID was profound. He was the driving force behind the founding of the school’s PhD program, the first program of its kind in the United States. He directed the product design program for more than 20 years, founded the Design Processes Laboratory, and worked and taught in the fields of design planning, computer-supported design, design methodology, and design theory. He created the Structured Planning methodology, a rigorous system for solving exceedingly complex problems used by such organizations as the National Parks Service and NASA.

A designer and researcher in academia and industry, Chuck collaborated with organizations as varied as Doblin, Steelcase, Kohler Company, the U.S. Air Force, and the New Zealand Government, while also advising several universities in the US and abroad. His commitment to solving society’s ills through design was evident in the projects he led at ID. Project Phoenix, for example, proposed a system to fight greenhouse gases, and Future Living proposed new systems that could transform housing in Chicago.

“
He was very optimistic about everything. He was a curious person always looking toward the future.
—Carlos Teixeira, ID associate professor

A beloved teacher, Chuck mentored his students to success and international acclaim. In 1991, Project Phoenix received Popular Science’s Grand Prize for Environmental Technology in the magazine’s “Best of What’s New” issue. Likewise, his students won grand prizes in the Japan Design Foundation’s International Design Competition and honors in the International Design Excellence Awards.

In 1990 he was the recipient of the American Center for Design’s Education Award for his contributions to design history, theory, and practice; five years later, he was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor.

“
The world we live in is full of complicated problems that seem to get worse, not easier, but the only way they will give up their secrets is if we learn to take them seriously, to tackle them with courage and confidence and endless curiosity. Chuck set us all on that path four decades ago, long before most of us thought it was a reasonable or possible thing to achieve.
—Larry Keeley, ID adjunct professor and president of Doblin Inc.

A tribute to Chuck was planned for October 18, 2019, as part of RSD8: The Eighth Annual Symposium of Relating Systems Thinking and Design and was recorded.

You can also view some of his lectures below, courtesy of ID alum Marc Fleischmann (BS 1976).

Visitation was Thursday, October 24, 2019, 4–9pm at HABEN Funeral Home & Crematory, 8057 Niles Center Road in Skokie, Illinois. Details here.

Structured Planning Lesson (Part 1)