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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Future Capture

By Camile Martinez | Masaya Tezuka | Meghna Prakash | Sujith Samuel

May 11, 2023

Helping leaders make decisions about their organization’s future through a toolkit to future cast innovation

Future Capture is a toolkit for futurecasting, enabling discussions about the influences that will shape the economic landscape in the coming decades. It uses driving force cards, wild cards, and futurecasting worksheets to facilitate conversations about current trends, case studies, and discontinuities. The goal is to help financial institutions understand these changes and how to pivot to meet consumer demands for data protection and personalization in the new digital economy.