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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Ruth Kikin-Gil

Responsible AI Strategist at Microsoft

Headshot of Ruth Kikin-Gil

Ruth Kikin-Gil is a design strategist leading Responsible AI and humanity-centered practices for Microsoft’s Security organization and beyond. She creates guidelines, processes, and tools to help integrate Responsible AI thinking in products.

Ruth is a co-creator of Microsoft’s Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction. She serves on the programming committee for Microsoft’s Machine Learning and Data Sciences (MLADS) conference, leads a women’s mentoring circles program in security, and was the programming co-director for IXDA’s Interaction conference in Seattle. She also teaches design at the Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) department at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Her career focuses on product innovation across devices, input methods, and platforms, including designing future experiences for Microsoft Office, creating future scenarios in an incubation lab, and working on a strategy team. Prior to Microsoft she founded a design agency, and worked in startups and as a consultant. She is a Bezalel Academy of Art and Design alumna and holds an Interaction Design degree from Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Italy.

Shapeshift Session

Corporate Panel: Beyond Silicon Valley | Thursday, May 29

About the Summit

Shapeshift Summit

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Immersion