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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Adithya Ravi on a Poetic Approach to Design

June 3, 2020

On ID’s Medium publication, Adithya Ravi (MDes 2020) proposes a design approach that borrows “a way of seeing and understanding experiences from the realm of poetry” in order to illuminate design paradoxes and reframe current design practices.

Adithya defines the traits of this poetic approach as fantastical, reflective, supervening, and transcendental, which he illustrates through the iconic chair designs of Konstantin Grcic, Maarten Baas, and Jonathan Muecke.

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Poetic approaches can lend the practice of design a more subjective edge, something that decades of professionalisation and commercial application have distorted. Poetics affords design a chance to go back to the untied knots, loose ends, and unfinished stories that foster conversation. It brings back a sense of freshness, spirituality, and a different cadence to design practice and fosters deeper reflection, greater sensitivity to experience, and more expressiveness and experimentality to the nature of the practise itself.

Read the full essay on Medium and find more of Adithya’s poetry and design writing at adithyaravi.com.