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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Shilpi Kumar

Founder & CEO, Khoj Lab

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Shilpi Kumar is the Founder and CEO of Khoj Lab, an innovation consultancy based in Chicago. Her mission is to help business leaders discover new growth opportunities and optimize the process as they scale innovation within their organizations using a human-centered approach. Her expertise lies in being a liaison between design and business thinking while engaging her clients in design-led methods and frameworks to enhance the value of their businesses further.

She has built a global team at Khoj Lab that reaches diverse audiences through a multi-cultural, multi-lingual (including English, Hindi, Cantonese, Mandarin, French and Spanish), women-led team of researchers, designers, strategists, and planners.

Shilpi is an alum of the Master of Design Methods (MDM) program at the Institute of Design.  She also holds a Master of Design from the Industrial Design Center at IIT Bombay, India, and a professional Bachelor of Architecture from BIT Mesra, Ranchi, India.

Industry Experience

Shilpi brings over 20 years of professional experience working as a design strategist, futurist, lead user experience researcher, industrial designer, architect, and design educator. She has worked closely with operations and strategy teams to define an integrated business process for new product development and align innovation ideas to company strategy. She specializes in taking an inclusive approach with an eye on bringing together diverse perspectives from people across the organization.

She led research programs to increase strategic relevance and focus on human-centered design for new product commercialization at initiatives at Herman Miller (now MillerKnoll). At GE Transportation, she facilitated digital business growth by designing business processes to support lean, agile, and user-focused approaches.

Selected Work

Kuman, Shilpi. 2021. “Myths of innovation and detangling them.” UX Collective Bootcamp.