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.

Show archive notice

We use technologies, such as cookies, to customize content and advertising, to provide social media features, and to analyze traffic to the site. By using or registering on any portion of this site, you agree to our privacy and cookie statement.

Privacy Statement

institute
of desiGn

Avani Agarwal

Product Designer at WhatsApp

Avani Agarwal is a Product Designer for GenAI at WhatsApp. She’s working to augment the myriad ways people use WhatsApp in their communities, relationships, and businesses with artificial intelligence.

Making technology that empowers users in real, tangible ways is a passion for Avani. Before joining WhatsApp, she was a UX designer at Google. She launched Where’s My Train in 2024, a GoogleMaps extension and led design for gloabl.Health, an international data-sharing platform during the COVID-19 epidemic.

Avani earned a Bachelor of Arts from Loyola University Chicago with Art Institute of Chicago and studied at Parsons School of Design. She is currently an adjunct faculty at Northwestern University’s MS EDI program.

Shapeshift Session

Designing AI Experiences for Global Scale | Thursday, May 29

About the Summit

Shapeshift Summit

Program

Immersion