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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Andreya Veintimilla on the Role of Design in Education Innovation

August 4, 2020

Andreya Veintimilla and students

Over on ID’s Medium publication, Andreya Veintimilla (MDes 2020) writes about the emerging role of design in education innovation.

Systems design, she writes, can “design elements within the ecosystem to empower people to make change” by:

  • designing incremental change
  • engaging in futures-thinking
  • and practicing codesign.

In applying systems design to education, Andreya sees parallels to the role of design in healthcare:

”Healthcare and education tend to be rigid, locked into doing things in particular ways, so it is necessary to start small by building internal allies who will commit to acting on new processes. Acting on the information gained from users and communities is critical to building the trust and buy-in necessary to sustain impact at the systems level. A person’s learning and health are a reflection of their relationship and experience with the products and services that institutions provide. Patient and learner engagement can be much more successful if those products and services are rooted in the context of the user — at the human level.”

Head over to Medium to read the full article and follow ID for more insights, interviews, and commentary from the ID community.