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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Dignified Futures

March 18-19, 2026
Institute of Design
3137 South Federal Street
Dignified Futures logo
A Two-day Convening For Those Committed to Centering Dignity in Complex Systems

Dignified Futures is a two-day convening of health and human services leaders, social innovators, futures thinkers, and designers committed to centering dignity in complex systems.

We face an escalating tension between speed, efficiency, resource constraints, and our capacity to partner meaningfully. In that tension, design often abandons dignity. Dignified Futures invites participants to intercept that downward spiral—to create updrafts of possibility that pull us forward together.

Over two days, the conference will include:

  • Workshops, keynotes, and ignite talks
  • Open Space sessions, allowing attendees to help co-create the agenda in real time and lead emergent conversations.
  • Networking, surprises, and community building that empowers all to meet new people and knit new relationships.

The conference spans multiple design practices (e.g. futures thinking, systems thinking, experience design and innovation, inclusivity and belonging, participatory practice) and sectors including health & human services, public health, social innovation, and equity in systems.

Why:

  • To recenter dignity in design, reclaiming it as a fundamental point of focus rather than an afterthought.
  • To elevate emerging practice in designing systems that sustain health, equity, and social justice.
  • To forge cross-disciplinary partnerships and co-design actionable strategies rooted in lived experience.