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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Elizabeth Blasius

Architectural Historian and Partner | Preservation Futures

Elizabeth Blasius is an architectural historian and writer, and partner in the firm Preservation Futures. She has worked extensively in the public and private sector. Her specialization within this work is how preservation policies come into play in the recovery and mitigation of the historic built environment following an event of climate violence, or other act of destruction. Blasius writes a monthly column for MAS Context, a non-profit architecture and design platform.

Elizabeth Blasius is a session presenter for the Design as Activism Symposium.