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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Purchasing Decision: Value Misalignment and Tolerance of Value

By Natthaporn Naktnasukanjn

May 16, 2025

Purchasing Decision: Value Misalignment and Tolerance of Value

Even among the best of us (ID folks) who support social values, cost and convenience are still the reality. This project seeks to understand people’s values (ID students, faculty, and staff) when they buy at John + Pat Anderson’s café on the first floor of the Kaplan building and how these values influence their purchasing decisions and their level of tolerance in case of value misalignment.

Project Details

  • Class: Research Realities
  • Instructor: Theresa Lafranchise | Julia Rochlin