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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Carole Segal

Co-Founder, Crate & Barrel

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Carole Segal is the co-founder of Crate & Barrel, the founder and former CEO of Foodstuffs, and the president of the Segal Family Foundation. A trustee of Rush University Medical Center and chair emeritus of the Board of Governors at Rush University, she is also a trustee emeritus of Bates College, a life trustee of Illinois Institute of Technology, a trustee of Chicago Theological Seminary, a trustee of Catholic Theological Union and is on the Board of Overseers of Colorado Mountain College. She serves on the Board of Forest Trends, Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Carole is a co-chair of the Illinois Business Immigration Coalition (IBIC) and a co-chair of the American Business Immigration Coalition (ABIC).