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’s Center for Collaborative Healthcare Design Named on New NIH Grant for Improving Sickle Cell Care

The Team Will Design New Tools to Help Patients Manage Long-Term and Acute Care

December 2, 2016

The Center for Collaborative Healthcare Design (CfCHD) at IIT Institute of Design in collaboration with UI Health, Sinai Urban Health Institute, and the University of South Carolina has been awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health to design, implement and test new tools and clinical supports to help sickle cell patients manage their long-term and acute care.  The six-year study named ISAAC (Improving Sickle cell care in Adolescents and Adults in Chicago) will have CfCHD’s Director, Kim Erwin and Assistant Director, Sarah Norell bringing design methods to the investigation of patient and clinical staff experience, and leading a team of graduate students in the planning and prototyping new tools and support solutions.

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is the most common genetic blood disorder in the United States and affects over 90,000 people, the majority of whom are African Americans. SCD patients suffer from a range of complications, including severe pain episodes and acute chest syndrome. Each year, SCD patients have over 190,000 emergency department (ED) visits and 110,000 hospital admissions. Through its work on ISAAC over the next six years, the Center for Collaborative Healthcare Design at IIT Institute of Design seeks to bring design to bear on improving the quality of patients’ lives. Kim Erwin stated, “We are delighted to collaborate with institutions already doing important work in this area. Their interest in adding design methods to their research processes makes this a powerful collaboration.”