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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Alumni

ID Alumni Yuta Katsuyama and Cristina Tarriba Featured on ABC 7 Chicago

Started as a Project in the Product Design Workshop at ID, their Business Now Supplies Onigiri to Over 30 Chicago-Area Locations

June 22, 2023

Packaged Onigiri

After coming to Chicago to study design and business, Yuta Katsuyama (MDes+MBA 2021) found himself missing onigiri, the nori-wrapped rice snacks that he grew up enjoying in Tokyo

Nostalgia for this portable snack inspired him to prototype a packaged onigiri in Martin Thaler‘s Product Design Workshop. The following summer, he tested out Onigiri Kororin as a five-week pop-up, bringing in Cristina Tarriba (MDes 2020) as co-founder. The business quickly took off and was recently featured on ABC 7 Chicago.

“
I feel a lot of support from the community, so I really enjoy doing business here. I didn’t expect this. More than 30 locations have our onigiri and it just started with my school project.
—Yuta Katsuyama

Watch the segment to learn more about their story and get a glimpse of their onigiri machine making over 1,400 onigiris per hour.

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