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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Chris Finlay

Founder, Borderland & Co.

Chris

Chris “Rocky” Finlay has over 20 years of brand-focused design and strategy experience that includes identity, communications, digital, and physical space design.

Chosen by BusinessWeek as one of 21 people who will change business, he has been a regular speaker on human-centered design and innovation strategy, taught graduate level courses on human-centered design, and authored the book Getting to Thank You, A Practitioner’s Guide to Innovation.

Previously he has served as a business leader at NOBULL, UnitedHealth Group, Optum, UnitedHealthcare, and Mayo Clinic, and worked for top innovation consultancies including Doblin, Cheskin, and the Business Innovation Factory. He has worked on challenging issues for clients such as Humana, Microsoft, Target, Hunter Douglas, and the Rocky Mountain Institute.

He has founded and sold multiple companies, and most recently founded Borderland & Co., a design-driven investment and strategy company.

He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, a Master of Design from the Institute of Design, and a Master of Business Administration from Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business.