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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Allison Karas

Staff Product Designer and Real-World Data Design Lead, Tempus Labs, Inc.

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In practice, research, and teaching, Allison Karas aims to make human-data systems broadly accessible. Her product and interaction design experience focuses on data platforms and enterprise systems that represent, analyze, learn, act, and build with data. Allison received her Master’s Degree in Graphic Design from North Carolina State University and her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from Iowa State University.

Industry Experience

Allison has over 15 years of product and service delivery experience from high-growth startups and global design firms. Currently, Allison is a lead product designer at Tempus Labs, Inc., a technology company dedicated to making its growing library of clinical and molecular data accessible and useful for patients, physicians, and researchers. Allison leads the design of real-world data tools and systems, including those that structure clinical data, manage internal medical ontology, and monitor incoming EHR records.

Allison’s product and interaction design practice is grounded in visual representation and systems design. She spent six years in the graphics studio at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (2008–2014), leading communication design that illustrated the relationships between people, cities, infrastructure and the environment. She consistently draws on those core skills and methods as a graphic designer for architecture and urban spaces, and applies them to visualize infrastructures and systems for digital experiences. Allison also worked at IA Collaborative on their Interaction Design team (2019), and Uptake Technologies (2017-2019) on their Data Platform.