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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Sen. Mattie Hunter Opens Rush-ID Summit

Summit focuses on equitable healthcare in Chicago

By Andrew Connor

October 6, 2021

Rush ID logos

On September 28, Illinois State Senator Mattie Hunter (Third District) presented a staggering statistic: there is a 16-year life expectancy gap between residents of downtown Chicago and residents of the city’s West Side.

Hunter’s remarks opened Equitable Primary Care in the Community, a virtual summit presented by Rush University Medical Center and IIT Institute of Design (ID).

“
Community feedback basically tells us the system often fails people who need it most. Community residents have said that the cost-benefit ratio of accessing primary care doesn’t add up.
—Mattie Hunter, Illinois State Senator

ID and Rush seek to create more equitable healthcare delivery for Chicago’s underserved populations, particularly those on the South and West sides. The project is co-led by Kim Erwin—an Associate Research Professor at ID and an experienced healthcare designer—and Rush Assistant Professor Santosh Basapur. Both moderated the summit.

Crucial to the work will be involving community members in the design process through participatory design.

“
We’re not just making [ideas] up and then testing them. We want these to be essentially co-created with the community so that the values of the communities are not just informing the design, but are also effectively addressing their specific wants and needs.
—Santosh Basapur, Rush Assistant Professor

In doing so, the team members behind the project hope to address gaps in understanding between care providers and residents. One important challenge, according to Kim Jay, senior community health worker consultant and trainer at Sinai Urban Health Institute, is addressing the mistrust of the medical system among Black and Brown residents in the South and West sides.

“When we think about why there’s resistance, especially in the Black and Brown communities, we think about some of the historical mistrust,” said Jay. “We think about the things that our parents told some of us…about how people of color were mistreated, how they were disregarded, how their input was not taken into consideration.”

ID Clinical Professor of Community-Driven Design Chris Rudd agreed.

“
Racism is the main thing we have to address if we’re going to think about an equitable future in healthcare, energy, and education—this is the crux of inequity in our system. Design is a powerful tool in the hands of residents. I don’t believe that designers alone will fix this. It will always have to be situated in the hands of the populace, to make the type of social change we want. But design can help.
—Chris Rudd, ID Clinical Professor of Community-Driven Design and Founder of ChiByDesign

The priorities of the project are threefold:

  • To create primary care options that are more accessible and convenient in order to reduce the high utilization rates of emergency room visits for non-acute issues
  • To employ local residents as part of a neighborhood pipeline of healthcare workers
  • To create standardized metrics that identify health issues on a neighborhood level

“There are some pretty major gaps in our healthcare system, the way it’s designed,” said Angela Moss, assistant dean of faculty practice at Rush’s College of Nursing, another panelist. “The system needs to be disrupted at every step. [Primary care] should be different, it should happen in different places, and providers need to be educated differently.

Erwin emphasized the importance of focusing on a regional strategy.

“
Engaging neighborhood residents to design primary care they trust, want, and will use is a common sense step forward. Place-based healthcare is a promising strategy to help medicine better fit communities.
—Kim Erwin, ID Associate Research Professor

The graduate schools at ID and Rush University will offer courses, seminars, and events in the coming months for students, clinicians, and executives.

Sign up here and select “Action Lab” to learn more and receive findings.

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