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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Sara Johnson

Senior Design Strategist / Incubator Manager, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma & Texas

Sara Johnson, Faculty member, stands in studio space

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Well-rounded design researcher and innovation strategist who relishes a wicked design riddle, with a focus on trans-disciplinary collaborations, ethnographic research, human factors, analytical frameworks, and systems thinking.

A versatile people-person who can connect with diverse populations interchangeably, such as research participants, students, clients and c-levels—while comfortable addressing or white-boarding for the masses.

Passionate evangelizer of design research and human-centered thinking.