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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Past Event

Creative Mornings: Tanner Woodford

July 31, 2026
8:30-10:00am CST
The Pitch at Kaplan
3137 S. Federal Street
Tanner Woodford
COMPETENCIA with Tanner Woodford

Tanner Woodford runs Iterative Work, an independent design studio focused on narrative-driven design for cultural organizations. He is also the art director of Newcity and paints optimistic, typographic murals across Chicago and beyond. He spent fourteen years as founding executive director of the Design Museum of Chicago and co-orchestrated the exhibition ID@85: 85 Years of Making the Future, which organized ID's story into four eras and is now on exhibit at the Institute of Design and available via Google Arts & Culture.

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