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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Podcast Episodes

With Intent Podcast

With Intent is a podcast from ID. In Season 3, co-hosts Albert Shum and Thamer Abanami discuss some of the best designs from the last 50 years and what they can tell us about what responsible design looks like tomorrow.

In Season 2, Scratching the Surface podcast host Jarrett Fuller, ID’s 2022–23 Latham Fellow, hosted conversations about the state of design and ID’s latest chapter as we celebrated 85 Years of Making the Future. These conversations are also collected in the book, Where Must Design Go Next?

In Season 1, host and producer Kristin Gecan talked to a range of people—writers, business strategists, policymakers, doctors, community organizers—about how they use design in their work.

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Contact

Portrait of PhD student Kristin Gecan

Kristin Gecan

Assistant Dean & Senior Director for Content

Contact Kristin with media inquiries, guest ideas, and other feedback.

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