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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JoEllen Kames

Director of User Experience Design at Tableau, a Salesforce Company

JoEllen Kames

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In addition to her current Adjunct Faculty position at the Institute of Design (ID), JoEllen Kames served as guest lecturer at MIT (2009–14) and at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (2011–15). JoEllen received a bachelor of arts degree in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a bachelor’s of fine arts in communication design from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Industry Experience

JoEllen is Director of User Experience Design at Tableau, a Salesforce company (previously Narrative Science). Powered by artificial intelligence, Tableau is redefining the future of data analytics with products that write stories from data to drive understanding and results. Prior to that, JoEllen was Portfolio Lead and Vice President at Northern Trust. There, she built new research and design capabilities and led a multidisciplinary team in defining a framework for meaningfully measuring digital experience metrics using a variety of data sources (2016–19). Before then, JoEllen was Senior Director of the Human Centered Design Studio within the United Healthcare Innovation Center of Excellence (2014–16), where she led ethnographic research + interaction design projects focused on population health. JoEllen was at Motorola from 2005 to 2014, ultimately serving as Senior Principal, Research + Design Strategy, Motorola Mobility.

Publications

Kames, JoEllen, Frank R. Bentley, Rafiq Ahmed, Rhiannon Sterling Zivin, Lauren Schwendimann. 2010. “Contacts 3.0: Bringing Together Research and Design Teams to Reinvent the Phonebook.” In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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