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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Dr. Marc R. Hannah

Co-founder, Silicon Graphics Inc.

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Dr. Marc Hannah co-founded Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) and spent 16 years helping grow the company from a small start-up to a multibillion dollar computer hardware and software company with products from desktop workstations to large, multiprocessor supercomputers. When Marc left the company in 1997, he was vice president and chief scientist.

Since leaving SGI, Marc has done consulting projects for SGI and other companies and has had high positions in multiple start-ups, including vice president of technology for Omniverse Digital Solutions, a minority-focused web-based media company; vice president of product architecture for Pulsent Corporation, a technology company developing compression technology for video delivery over the Internet; and chief technology officer for SongPro, a consumer electronics company focused on offering portable media players cartridges and content for the Nintendo Game Boy. Marc has also served on several corporate boards. He is a partner in SUDA (Strategic Urban Development Alliance), an Oakland-based development company with projects in the San Francisco Bay Area and Ghana.