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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Ahmad Jitan

Director of Organizing and Advocacy | IMAN

Ahmad Jitan is a community organizer, poet, and educator based in the South Side of Chicago. He is currently the Director of Organizing and Advocacy at Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) where he leads efforts around food sovereignty, health equity, police accountability, and youth leadership development.

Like many other Palestinians and children of refugees, Ahmad has called many places home. An immigrant to the United States from a young age, he was raised predominantly in the U.S. South, whose culture of resistance and resilience he carries with him to this day. Ahmad has worked as an educator and community organizer advocating for young people, racial justice, Palestinian solidarity, and immigrant and refugee rights in Durham, NC; Brooklyn, NY; Beirut, Lebanon; and Nablus, Palestine.

For Ahmad, the process of seeking justice is as much a spiritual practice and a healing practice as it is a political one. It is these shared practices and the transformative relationships that arise from them that motivate Ahmad to continue the fight for a better world.

Ahmad Jitan is a session presenter for the Design as Activism Symposium.