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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Don Norman

Director, DesignLab, U​niversity of ​California, San Diego​

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Don Norman returned to the University of California, San Diego to start the Design Lab, a research and teaching unit focused upon complex sociotechnical issues such as healthcare and automation (human-technology teamwork). He is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, an IDEO fellow, a former vice president of Apple, and an advisor and board member of numerous companies. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Don is professor emeritus of computer science and design at Northwestern University and professor emeritus of both psychology and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego and an advisor to and honorary professor of Tongji Universityís College of Design and Innovation. He has been distinguished visiting professor of industrial design at Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Don was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science and has honorary degrees from University of Padua (Italy) and Delft University of Technology (Netherlands). His books include Emotional Design, Living with Complexity, and, most recently, an expanded and revised edition of Design of Everyday Things.