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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Nick Adam

Associate Partner & Design Director | Span

Nick Adam’s design career began within the diverse, underground, subcultures of 1990s punk, rave, and graffiti-writing scenes. These lived experiences provide a foundational awareness and interest of cultural nuance, identity, and visual language. Today, as associate partner and design director of Span, Nick brings over two decades of experience in crafting meaning-filled visual identity systems. His strategic approach centers on harnessing the qualities of identity to shape typographic nuances, design strategies, and interactive experiences that create advocates and shift culture.

Nick Adam is a session presenter for the Design as Activism Symposium.