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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Rohit Prasad

SVP & Head Scientist, Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon

Rohit Prasad is senior vice president and head scientist for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) at Amazon. In this role, Rohit leads a team that is developing and deploying the company’s most capable generative AI technologies—including Amazon Nova, state-of-the-art foundation models that deliver frontier intelligence and industry-leading price performance.

Prior to AGI, Rohit served as senior vice president and head scientist for Amazon Alexa, leading a multi-disciplinary team focused on advancing generalizable AI, combining the best of human-like intelligence with machine learning. His team’s product, engineering, and scientific advances have driven the adoption of AI by millions of customers worldwide. In his previous roles at Amazon, Rohit directed areas of conversational AI, such as far-field speech recognition, natural language understanding, and Amazon Echo’s underlying machine learning technologies.

Prior to Amazon, Rohit was deputy manager and senior director of the Speech, Language and Multimedia Business Unit at Raytheon BBN Technologies. Rohit is a named author on more than 100 scientific articles and holds several patents. He’s a board director for the Partnership on AI, a non-profit partnership of academic, civil society, industry, and media organizations creating solutions so that AI advances positive outcomes for people and society. In 2024, he was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI.

He has a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Illinois Tech and a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology, India.

Shapeshift Session

Keynote & Fireside Chat: Our Professional Futures in the Age of AI | Thursday, May 29

About the Summit

Shapeshift Summit

Program

Immersion