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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Behavioral Design for Organizational Leadership

Behavioral Design for Organizational Leadership

Behavioral design is an increasingly common approach to help individuals adopt new and beneficial behaviors, such as saving more for retirement or embracing new habits to improve personal health. Organizational leaders can apply the same insights about human behavior to create institutional conditions which support behaviors aligned with organizational values, goals, and metrics.

This course will provide and build on basic concepts from the field of behavioral design and allow participants to apply frameworks on real-world, and personally relevant leadership challenges.

Instructor

Ruth Schmidt