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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Mo Sook Park

Founder, i-D Leadership Consulting

Mo Sook Park

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Mo Sook Park is a facilitator of leadership development training who specializes in adaptive leadership and systems thinking that integrates group dynamics and team development theory. She joined the Institute of Design (ID) as Adjunct Faculty in 2019, designing its Adaptive Leadership course. The course aims to help designers leverage their training to advance an organization’s capacity to adapt and exercise innovation while operating in volatile ecosystems.

Mo received a bachelor’s degree in social science from Harvard University and a master of education degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Industry Experience

More than 15 years of working in strategy, research, operations, and program development inform Mo’s work as an independent consultant at i-D Leadership Consulting, a Chicago-based company she founded in 2010. There, she combines the frameworks of adaptive leadership, design thinking, and systems thinking to help her partner clients—including the Chicago Public Schools and US Fish and Wildlife Service—survive and thrive. Additionally, she is a faculty member of the Center of Leadership Development in the Office of Personnel Management, where she trains senior executives of the federal government in adaptive leadership and has designed and facilitated leadership development programs for federal employees focusing on conflict management and team development. Mo formerly served as Operations Lead at Adaptable, Inc., from 2011–13, a Boston startup that sought to create an innovative branding platform.

Speaking and Publishing

Mo’s invited speaking roles include “Designing Partnerships for Large Scale Impact,” a presentation at ID Design Intersections 2019; “Building Community Capacity,” a lecture for Transition Design PhD and graduate students (Carnegie Mellon School of Design, 2019); and “Advanced Group Dynamics,” a lecture for master’s students in clinical social work on group dynamic and social system theory and their application to the framework of adaptive leadership (Loyola University School of Social Work, 2019). Mo’s articles include “Leading Transitions to the New Economy: 5 Leadership Skills for a New Era” (2019).

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Adaptive Leadership