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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Faculty

Assistant Dean Matt Mayfield Selected as Coleman Fellow

Associate Dean Matt Mayfield Honored as a Coleman Foundation Entrepreneurship Faculty Fellow

August 24, 2015

Assistant Dean of Academics, Matt Mayfield is one of three IIT faculty members selected as a Coleman Fellow this year. This is the 7th year of the program focused on teaching concepts of entrepreneurship outside of traditional business school programs. Matt’s work in this program will be prototyping online and digital tools to teach concepts of entrepreneurship.

The Coleman Fellows Program was established to advance one of the funding strategies in the Foundation’s entrepreneurship program: to catalyze cross-campus entrepreneurship. A key goal of the Program is to empower Fellows to effectively spread self-employment education across his or her campus. There are over 15 colleges across the US involved in the Coleman Fellows Program. Nik Rokop (MDM 2012) is the IIT director and liaison with the Coleman Foundation this year. He is responsible for selecting Fellows and building IIT’s campus team.

Goals of the Fellows Program:

  1. Build support for entrepreneurship education in non-business departments across campuses of participating schools;
  2. Advance the Coleman Foundation’s Definition of Entrepreneurship with focus on self-employment and for-profit business creation; and
  3. Cultivate cohorts of entrepreneurship educators on individual campuses and across many disciplines outside the school of business.

Intended impact of Coleman Foundation Entrepreneurship Education Funding:

  • Emerging student entrepreneurs will experience richer experiential co-curricular activities over the course of their programs
  • Emerging entrepreneurs will be successful at starting and running businesses

More about the Coleman Fellows Program