In 2026, after nearly 90 years, the Institute of Design came under new management. 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

In the Loop: Liz Gerber

October 29, 2013
12:30-2:00pm CST
IIT Institute of Design, 6th floor
350 North LaSalle Street
Chicago, IL 60654

Collective Intelligence for and by Design: Understanding Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing


When we think about innovations in design, we tend to focus on the outcome—assistive technology for the blind, micro-electric health monitors, eco-building materials—but it’s teams of people who work day after day to come up with new ideas and realize better solutions.


Liz Gerber studies and design systems to support the people behind the scenes. In this talk, she'll present collective intelligence for and by design and examine how crowdfunding and crowdsourcing help designers get their work done.


About Liz


As the Breed Junior Chair of Design at Northwestern University and founder of Design for America, Dr. Elizabeth Gerber studies and designs collective intelligence systems to support design and innovation. Practically, she draws on her design experience in the toy, aerospace, and medical industries. She received her doctoral and master’s degrees in management science and engineering and product design from Stanford University.

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