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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Past Event

Erika Allen: Lucas J. Daniel Lecture in Sustainable Systems

April 25, 2022
6:00-7:00pm CST
Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech
3137 South Federal Street
Chicago, IL 60616
Erika Allen, co-founder and CEO of the Urban Growers Collective, discusses food systems in Chicago.

In this fourth annual lecture, the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech invites Erika Allen, co-founder and CEO of the Urban Growers Collective, to discuss food systems in Chicago and beyond for Earth Month. Erika will explore food waste, circular economies, and community participatory research in her talk, which will be followed by a discussion with ID Associate Professor of Environmental Management and Sustainability Weslynne Ashton. The event will take place in the Steelcase space at the Kaplan Institute on Illinois Tech's Mies Campus.

Visitors to Kaplan must have proof of vaccination.

The event will also be streamed. Register as a virtual attendee to receive the streaming link.

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 IIT 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.

About the Institute of Design (ID)

The Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech was founded in Chicago by Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy in 1937. It has since pioneered human-centered design, systems design, and a methods-based approach to design. Today ID is home to the only US design school devoted completely to graduate students—the first to offer the PhD in design. Uniting science and rigor with creativity and rapid iteration, ID focuses on the systems that shape modern life (including cities, education, finance, food, healthcare, and technology) and building new worlds from them, together. Learn more about ID at id.iit.edu.

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