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: Marie Hicks

September 30, 2014
12:30-2:00pm CST
IIT Institute of Design, 6th floor
350 N LaSalle St
Chicago, IL 60654

Mapping Bathrooms, Making Movies: Modeling the Humanities' Utility While Teaching at a Technical School


Teaching humanities to engineers at a technical university presents challenges and requires a rethinking of traditional pedagogical techniques. This talk looks at some methods for how to approach hard-to-reach audiences and how to inculcate humanities skills and knowledge in students more interested in the technical. By looking at several learning case studies of applied humanities, this talk will show how the humanities can be positioned as a useful public good rather than as an abstract academic topic.


About Marie


Marie Hicks is an assistant professor of history in the Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is a historian of technology, gender, and modern Europe (focusing on Britain). She focuses on the history of computing and is interested in how the humanities can be marshaled to change sociotechnical infrastructure.


Marie will speak as part of "In the Loop", a lecture series on design, innovation and entrepreneurship organized by IIT Institute of Design faculty. The series engages a wide range of speakers that present on topics ranging from theoretical research and emerging methodologies that are relevant to the field of design as well as personal narratives and examples from current design practice.

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