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 Schmidt and Will Rutter Discuss Positive Sum Design

Learn more about fostering win-win outcomes

April 5, 2022

Positive Sum Design panel

Associate professor Ruth Schmidt and current MDes + MPPA student Will Rutter are panelists on the Yale Center for Engineering, Innovation, and Design’s first live conversation about positive sum design, a topic sits at the intersection of systems, behavioral, and humanity-centered design.

Will summarizes positive sum design on Medium:

Positive Sum Design (PSD) is a combined cultural critique and basis for approaching a design practice. Borrowing language and concepts from the field of game theory, PSD eschews zero-sum bias and suggests that the gains from positive-sum systems and interactions are of paramount importance as we forge culture and design the shared world. Arguably, PSD challenges designers to do what they have always done: create in a way that yields a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

You can learn more about positive sum design and the panelists here.

Join the informal discussion on Zoom this Friday, April 8, 12:30–2pm CT:

Zoom link
Meeting ID: 875 2595 8396
Passcode: Eitb3k

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