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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Mapping IIT Dining Relationships

By Isaac Jang

May 11, 2023

"Mapping IITʻs dining assets and relationships in current and future states "

The goal of this project was to uncover the abundance of dining-related assets within IIT, including knowledge, relationships, people, equipment, and spaces. The first seven weeks were spent speaking with IIT leaders and staff to identify all existing assets on campus. The following seven weeks were dedicated to refining the perspective and physical format for communicating the findings.

The resulting physical map displays the relationships between IIT and different food service providers in current and hypothetical states. In the current state, financial flows are emphasized to highlight the extractive nature of IIT Dining’s current model, where profits flow out of IIT’s campus to New York and then to the UK. Local food providers and organizations are excluded from the current state.

The base map and local assets are fixed, while relationships are displayed on a sliding transparent layer, emphasizing that the same assets exist in both scenarios. The hypothetical scenario does not propose any new assets.

Project Details

  • Class: Methods of Communty Development
  • Instructor: Maura Shea
Isaac Jang

Isaac Jang

MDes + MPA 2023