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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Carm McDonald

Senior Manager, Product Design, Target

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Formally trained in architecture, Carm adopts the Bauhaus principle of “less is more” in her approach to user experience design—emphasizing simplicity, minimalism, and intentional clarity for greater impact and quality in design.

Industry Experience

Carm McDonald (she/her) is a Product Design Leader, Educator, and Creative Problem Solver, with 15+ years of crafting and leading award-winning e-commerce digital products. Her career spans startups and Fortune 500 companies across diverse industries, including key leadership roles at CDW, United Airlines, Shopify, and Target.

A passionate educator deeply committed to nurturing talent in UX and design, Carm has enriched Chicago’s vibrant design community as a founder of DesignTech, Lead Instructor at General Assembly, and Adjunct Faculty at the Institute of Design.

Carm holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Science in Information Architecture from Illinois Tech.

Speaking

“0 Results: Architecting an Information Strategy for Improving Product Search” at World Information Architecture Day, Chicago, 2017.

“From Queries to Conversion: A Closer Look at AI-Powered Search” at  the SpotOn Speaker Series, Chicago, 2025.