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.

institute
of desiGn
Search
Past Event

Chuck Owen Memorial

January 25, 2020
1:00-4:00pm CST
IIT Institute of Design
3137 South Federal Street
Chicago, IL 60616
The ID community and beyond are invited to celebrate the life and legacy of ID Distinguished Professor Emeritus Charles L. Owen.

The ID community and beyond are invited to celebrate the life and legacy of ID Distinguished Professor Emeritus Charles L. Owen, a systems design pioneer. The public is invited to begin perusing artifacts and exhibits at 1pm; a program led by John Pipino, who co-taught with Chuck, will begin at 2pm. ID faculty and emeritus faculty, including Kei Sato and Vijay Kumar (both who studied under Owen and held Charles L. Owen named professorships), will also share memories of their beloved teacher.

Charles L. (Chuck) Owen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at IIT Institute of Design (ID), passed away on October 17, 2019. Chuck—who began teaching at ID in 1965 and retired in 2010—was a pioneer in the area of systems design, and dedicated his life to understanding and designing large-scale systems. His holistic approach to influencing systemic transformations have inspired generations of designers around the world.

Chuck’s impact on ID was profound. He was the driving force behind the founding of the school’s PhD program, the first program of its kind in the United States. He directed the product design program for more than 20 years, founded the Design Processes Laboratory, and worked and taught in the fields of design planning, computer-supported design, design methodology, and design theory. He created the Structured Planning methodology, a rigorous system for solving exceedingly complex problems used by such organizations as the National Parks Service and NASA.

A designer and researcher in academia and industry, Chuck collaborated with organizations as varied as Doblin, Steelcase, Kohler Company, the U.S. Air Force, and the New Zealand Government, while also advising several universities in the US and abroad. His commitment to solving society’s ills through design was evident in the projects he led at ID. Project Phoenix, for example, proposed a system to fight greenhouse gases, and Future Living proposed new systems that could transform housing in Chicago.

A beloved teacher, Chuck mentored his students to success and international acclaim. In 1991, Project Phoenix received Popular Science’s Grand Prize for Environmental Technology in the magazine’s “Best of What’s New” issue. Likewise, his students won grand prizes in the Japan Design Foundation’s International Design Competition and honors in the International Design Excellence Awards.

In 1990 he was the recipient of the American Center for Design’s Education Award for his contributions to design history, theory, and practice; five years later, he was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor.

Register