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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Institute of Design | With Intent

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With Intent — Season 1 Trailer

September 28, 2021

01:04

S1: Trailer

00:00
00:00

Transcript

Speaker 1: Anytime we are shaping our environment to suit human needs we are designing and the ways that we do draw boxes around design often implicate institutional, or national, or other forms of power that some people exert over other people.

 

Speaker 2: I see design as one of my tools in my toolkit of how I want to affect change in my community. We have designed something that will meet people’s needs but also be a positive experience.

 

Speaker 3: Creativity generally is at its best when conditions are dire. The origins of hip hop is informality. The origins of jazz is informality. When you add informality to the picture what you’re able to see is that we’ve created a process of survival.

 

Speaker 4: The answers to the questions of the world must exist in the world already and all we have to do is look at how nature works and that will give us inspiration about how people in technology can work as well.

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Utopianism and technology with Morgan Ames

S1 EP1