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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David McGaw

Design Strategy & UX Research Lead, Google Deepmind

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David is a design strategist and UX researcher in Google DeepMind’s interdisciplinary “product inception” team, developing ways emerging AI technologies can become useful for people. He has worked on AI agents and assistants, home-based robots, quantum computing, and AI for climate change. Prior to coming to Google, he was an innovation insights leader in McKinsey & Company’s design studio, advising senior executives in consumer products and healthcare companies; in earlier roles, he guided strategic planning, product innovation, and internal alignment efforts for insurance, energy, and consumer product companies, as well as philanthropic organizations and US government agencies/departments in financial regulation, transportation, and national security. He has taught at the Centro De Estudios Superiores De Diseño in Monterrey, Mexico, and at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he earned an MDes; he holds an undergraduate history degree from Yale.