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

Deb Chachra: Lucas J. Daniel Series in Sustainable Systems

April 8, 2025
6:00-8:00pm CST
Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech
3137 South Federal Street
Chicago, IL 60616
Join Us at ID or Streaming

Deb Chachra, author of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World (2023), and Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering, presents the seventh annual Lucas J. Daniel Lecture in Sustainable Systems at the Institute of Design.

Deb Chachra’s talk, “Just, Creative, and Cooperative: Our Shared Infrastructural Future,” will consider how our infrastructural networks, including electricity, water and sewage, telecommunications, and transportation, shape and enable our lives as we know them. The networks that we benefit from today are the physical embodiment of the values of those who came before us. Today, with new possibilities of renewable energy generation at scale, we have the opportunity to transform these systems – and our built environment – to be reliable and sustainable, resilient and equitable.

This event will happen at the home of the Insitute of Design, on the Illinois Tech Mies campus in Bronzeville.

This event will be streamed but not recorded.

A Q&A with ID faculty member Jessica Meharry will follow the talk.

About Deb Chachra
Deb Chachra is currently Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering, outside Boston, Massachusetts, where she was among the earliest faculty members. She works primarily at the intersection of technology and culture: she writes, thinks, speaks, builds, consults, collaborates, and facilitates globally, with a focus on infrastructure and the built environment, design, equity and inclusion, and education (particularly engineering education). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Time, The Guardian, and Nature. She appeared on Vox’s “FuturePerfect 2024” list of activists and thinkers working to build a more positive future, and her TED talk on infrastructure can be found online.

Faculty Organizers
Jessica Meharry is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute of Design, where she teaches courses in the politics of design, critical contexts of design, and the philosophical context of design research. She develops justice-oriented design methodologies for professional practice. Her book, Working With Design Clients: Tools and Advice for Successful Partnerships (Bloomsbury, September 2024) is a practical guide to working on real-life briefs in the design studio.

About the Lucas J. Daniel Series in Sustainable Systems
The focus of ID’s annual event in memory of ID alum Lucas J. Daniel (1974–2017) is to drive discourse in sustainability and systems design, areas Lucas was passionate about. Lucas was a 2005 Institute of Design (ID) graduate who spent 11 years at Chicago design and innovation consultancy gravitytank. There he applied holistic, systems-level thinking to food innovation. Learn more about the series.

Register