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

Sheryl Cababa: Lucas J. Daniel Series in Sustainable Systems

April 11, 2024
6:00-8:00pm CST
Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech
3137 South Federal Street
Chicago, IL 60616

Sheryl Cababa, VP of Strategy at Substantial, shares her insights about designing for a more equitable world with systems thinking.

For the sixth annual Lucas J. Daniel Lecture in Sustainable Systems, Sheryl Cababa, VP of Strategy at Substantial and author of Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers (Rosenfield, 2023), shares her insights.

Sheryl’s talk, “Designing For A More Equitable World with Systems Thinking,” will happen at the newest building on Illinois Tech’s Mies campus, the Kaplan Institute, which is home to the Institute of Design.

In-person attendees will also be the first to receive ID’s 2024 report on the state of design. This event will also be streamed.

A Q&A and discussion with ID faculty member Maura Shea will follow the talk.

Designing For A More Equitable World with Systems Thinking

Whether design thinking can have actual impact in today’s complex world is a real question, and some design practitioners have become disillusioned with approaches that emphasize products and profit over people. In this talk, Sheryl discusses how there is still a spark of value in some of the tenets of design thinking, but to make it really shine, and to design for a more just and equitable world, systems thinking needs to be at the center of the designer’s practice. Sheryl will share stories, approaches and methods that help designers kickstart or expand on their systems thinking practice and will consider the challenges and assumptions that designers have about systems thinking.

Register