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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Paolo Tanedo

Innovation Engineer, Navistar

Paolo Tanedo

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Paolo Tanedo is a maker by nature and a technologist by trade. A former mechanical engineer in the automotive industry, he now bridges the often-found gaps between design and engineering. He brings technology to the forefront to enable, bolster, and animate what might otherwise remain theory and speculation.

Paolo has a master’s degree in design from the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. He has a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University where he studied automotive technology and focused on improving hydrogen fuel cell electrochemistry.

Industry Experience

Paolo is an Innovation Engineer at Navistar, where he and the rest of the innovation team lead efforts to solve systematic technical challenges. He assists in HMI and UX designs, as well as enables research by designing and building the team’s first fully-interactive driving simulator.

He pivoted from engineering in 2017 when he gained admission into ID’s Foundation program, where he leveraged his technical skills to breathe life into his designs. Graduating in 2019, he found a position shortly thereafter as a Digital Product Designer at Magic+Might, a Chicago-based design consultancy. During his time there, Paolo built and rebuilt driving simulators for automotive clients as well as helped design the HMI within them, furthering research and gathering insights on how to improve them along the way.

Previously he worked at General Motors’ Powertrain HQ in Pontiac, MI where he fed his passions for technology and energy sustainability.

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