In 2026, after nearly 90 years, the Institute of Design came under new management. 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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Past Event

Profit vs. Purpose

September 16, 2021
6:00-7:00pm CST
Online
ID faculty discuss their professional experiences as designers and debate how their work connects to commerce and/or social impact.

ID houses what we consider ‘the business school for design,’ yet our focus is on building cooperative, intelligent, responsible futures. Perhaps more than any other design school, here we are uniting two distinct requirements: 1) profit (i.e., desirable, feasible, viable) with 2) purpose (i.e., equitable, just, sustainable). In a conversation moderated by ID alum Renee Albrecht-Mallinger (MDes 2018), ID faculty Jeremy Alexis, Jody Campbell, Tomoko Ichikawa, and Chris Rudd discuss their professional experiences as designers and debate how their respective practices, projects, and partners (Magic & Might, UChicago Medicine, ChiByDesign) connect to commerce and/or social impact.

A Q+A session will be focused on answering questions from emerging designers and prospective students about reconciling an interest in doing meaningful work with the need for a paycheck.

About IIT Institute of Design (ID)

IIT Institute of Design (ID) builds responsible, cooperative, intelligent futures. Founded by László Moholy-Nagy as The New Bauhaus in 1937, ID is known for pioneering human-centered design and systems design. Today ID is home to the only US design school devoted completely to graduate students. But ID is more than a graduate school. ID is an international community of learners and practitioners who are addressing the biggest issues of our time by eliciting a power unique to humans: creativity. Learn more about ID at id.iit.edu.

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