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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ID, ‘An Absolutely Essential Part of the Bauhaus history,’ Partners with Google Arts & Culture

Google's Bauhaus Everywhere project features artifacts from ID's early days

By Andrew Connor

January 6, 2020

Google Arts & Culture has launched Bauhaus Everywhere, its in-depth digital project covering the life and legacy of the iconic German art and design school. In bringing the project to life, Google collaborated with IIT Institute of Design (ID), Bauhaus Dessau, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and four other institutions.

“
When setting out to work on a new project we always begin by diving into the research, and we tend to see our partners as one of our best resources here. IIT Institute of Design continually came up as an absolutely essential part of the Bauhaus history and lineage.
—Simon Delacroix, Program Manager at Google Arts & Culture

ID’s contributions to Bauhaus Everywhere pertain to the German school’s influence in Chicago, as László Moholy-Nagy came to the city to start a design school “along lines Bauhaus” in the late 1930s. Artifacts, photos, and documents are featured in ID’s story, an online exhibition called Founding an American Bauhaus.

The exhibit was researched and curated by Todd Cooke (MDes + MBA 2020), who worked with Illinois Institute of Technology’s University Archives and Special Collections and Google to digitize the story. Cooke also produced an abbreviated physical version of the exhibit for Illinois Tech’s Shapeshift design festival in September.

“
I believe the past has a lot to teach, and so much of what I discovered in the archive over the summer resonates deeply with the work I am doing today as a designer, the exceptional work I see my classmates producing, and the overall direction of the school.
—Todd Cooke (MDes + MBA 2020)

Read more at Illinois Tech news.