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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Patrick Whitney

Steelcase Endowed Chair and Dean Emeritus

Steelcase Endowed Chair and Dean Emeritus Patrick Whitney is Professor in Residence at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He has published and lectured throughout the world about ways of making technological innovations more humane, the link between design and business strategy, and methods of designing interactive communications and products. His writing is generally about new frameworks of design that respond to three transformations: linking insights about user experience to business strategy, the shift from mass-production to flexible production, and the shift from national markets to markets that are both global and “markets of one.”

BusinessWeek has profiled Whitney as a “design visionary” for bringing together design and business, Forbes named him as one of six members of the “E-Gang” for his work in human-centered design, Fast Company has identified him as a “master of design” for linking the creation of user value and economic value, and Global Entrepreneur named him one of the 25 people worldwide doing the most to bring new ideas to business in China.

He was the principal investigator of several research projects at the Institute of Design, including “Global Companies in Local Markets,” “Design for the Base of the Pyramid,” and “Schools in the Digital Age.” His recent work has been supported by several grants, including funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, SC Johnson, the Steelcase Foundation, and numerous corporations.

He is a trustee of the Global Heritage Fund, which supports restoration of heritage sites and local communities in the developing world.

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A New Model for Hybrid Life