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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Ravi Mahamuni

Head of Design Research Lab, TCS Research, India

Ravi is design thinker with twenty-eight years of industry experience in diverse roles. He is an author of over fifty research papers and the lead inventor of fifteen patents. Ravi’s research interests cover aspects that inform design for change, service design for scale, and how service designers can facilitate the change that people and communities’ desire. With his rich background in both technology and management, Ravi believes in technology as an enabler to humanize services.

He was a member of the inaugural advisory board of the Social Design Institute (SDI), University of the Arts London (UAL), London, UK, and is currently a member of the Departmental Advisory Committee for the Design Department at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India. He is a board member of several national and international colleges.

Shapeshift Session

Pune Salon Recap: Skillbuilding and Social Impact | Friday, May 30

About the Summit

Shapeshift Summit

Program

Immersion