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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Brandon Schauer

SVP, Climate Culture at Rare

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Brandon is a program leader at Rare, a conservation nonprofit with a distinctly human approach. At Rare, Brandon directs the Climate Culture program, helping Americans adopt high-impact climate solutions that reduce carbon emissions. 

Previously, Brandon served as CEO of Adaptive Path, a pioneering UX design firm. Under his leadership, the firm was acquired by Capital One in 2014, where WIRED described it as having an “outsized effect on the Web we know.” Brandon now applies his expertise in design and human-centered approaches to inspire climate action.