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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Shannon Delaney is Moving Durham, NC to Action

Delaney, an ID alum and design strategist for the City of Durham, works with residents to find a composting solution

By Kristin Gecan

October 21, 2019

Composting in Durham, NC

What does Durham love even more than diverting food waste from landfills and contributing to healthier soil?” writes Shannon Delaney (MDes 2018) in a recent LinkedIn post. “Co-creating equitable, municipal services with the very community it’s going to serve.”

The first question for Delaney and her team when they started working on their composting project for Durham, North Carolina, was whether composting was something residents and the city could and would take on—whether it was desirable and how it was feasible.

It was also critical for residents to be part of the design process.

From Fast Company:

“
People get really attached to their methods. So finding a way that works for them without being prescriptive was interesting for us. One of the most interesting takeaways for me was people’s willingness to really try something, even if they had never done it before.
—Shannon Delaney (MDes 2017)

Now the city is working on its next prototype before it introduces a fuller pilot of the program.

The project is funded through a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Cities around the world are adopting human-centered design techniques to improve civic life and civic infrastructures. Through participatory processes like these, design can address large-scale problems effectively, ensure access, and promote sustainability. At the same time, communities come together.

Read more about the project from Fast Company and Bloomberg Cities on Medium.

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