In 2026, after nearly 90 years, the Institute of Design came under new management. 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

Norman Winarsky: If You Really Want to Change the World

October 13, 2015
7:00-9:00pm CST
3D Systems
431 Tehama Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

 


We are inviting friends and alumni of IIT Institute of Design to one event on the Strategy World Tour San Francisco. Norman Winarsky, Stanford lecturer and co-author of If You Really Want to Change the World: A Guide to Creating, Building, and Sustaining Breakthrough Ventures will speak on founding Siri, how to overcome the "valley of death" between invention and innovation, and personalized services at scale. 


Guests will have dinner with Norman and the participants of the Strategy World Tour. Each will leave with a pre-release copy of Norman's book, coming out on Harvard Business Review October 20th, 2015. 


About Norman


Norman Winarsky is Advisor to Ventures Groups, Consultant, Author, and Angel Investor. He is past President of SRI Ventures, and has been responsible for creating SRI’s highest value venture and license opportunities. He is a founder of SRI’s venture process, which includes venture and license incubation, seed funding, the Entrepreneur-In-Residence program, and the nVention venture forum.


Norman was co-founder and board member of Siri, which was spun out from SRI in January 2008. Siri has now been incorporated into all Apple iPhones.


He is author of If You Really Want to Change the World: A Guide to Creating, Building, and Sustaining Breakthrough Ventures, a Harvard Business Review publication.


Norman helped found 35 ventures and has a particular focus on natural language, computer vision, and artificial intelligence.


He was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford, Chairman of the University of Chicago Visiting Committee for the Physical Sciences Division, and a member of the National Academy Committee on Forecasting Future Disruptive Technologies. He was also a National Science Foundation Fellow, an invited member of the mathematics department of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and an Assistant Professor at SUNY at Albany.


In 2011, Norman received the University of Chicago Alumni Service Award. In 2000, He and his team received an Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in technological advancement. In addition, he has received RCA’s highest honor, the Sarnoff Award.


Norman graduated with a B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, and was awarded Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. In addition he was awarded the Paul J. Cohen award for the outstanding student in Mathematics.

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