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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Creating Bean-ingful Experiences

By Avani Chaturvedi | Aabha A. Kale | Anish Patil | Dennis Siegert | Yanshu Zhou

May 10, 2024

Understanding Students' Perceptions of Beans and Vegetables to Promote Environmentally-Friendly Eating

By analyzing behaviors with methodologies like COM-B, user journeys, and prioritization matrices, we gained insights into students’ meal choices.

We studied students’ perceptions of food through desk research, primary sources, and direct observations in university cafeterias. Then, we ideated with stakeholders, prioritized the impact and duration of strategies, and designed communication pieces and recommendations to encourage the choice of bean-based and vegetable meals over meat in universities.

View the full presentation here.

Project Details

  • Class: Behavioral Design Workshop
  • Instructor: Ruth Schmidt
  • Project Partner: Food for Climate League

Avani Chaturvedi

MDes 2024

Aabha Kale

MDes + MBA 2024

Anish Patil

MDes 2024

Dennis Siegert

MDes 2024

Yanshu Zhou

MDes 2024