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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John Grimes

Professor Emeritus

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John Grimes is a professor emeritus at the Institute of Design, where he teaches courses in interactive media, software design, visualization of information, and imaging. His research at ID examines the uses of images in interactive media, the future of publications, and the development of user-research methods. One of his current projects, a software-based system for facilitating research into user values, has been sponsored by ID’s Tangible Knowledge Consortium, a unique corporate-sponsored research initiative funded by Motorola, Steelcase, Lante, Andersen, and Zebra Technologies. Along with Professor Whitney, he has participated in the development of the Electronic Learning Record, now Bettr@, under the sponsorship of the MacArthur Foundation.

Professor Grimes is also a leader in the development of computer-supported digital imaging and is an authority on the history and development of photography. He has written and lectured extensively about these subjects, and in 1992 he co-edited The New Vision, published by Aperture. He has been a frequent juror for computer animation competitions.

Over the years Professor Grimes has participated in many professional organizations, including the Society for Photographic Education and ACM-SIGGRAPH. He has organized symposia on the future of the image in publication, and his own images have been included in a number of exhibitions and permanent gallery collections. He holds a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MS from the Institute of Design.

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Matt Marcus, CXO at Leo Burnett