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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Soul Sighting

By June Kulwadee Pruksananonda

May 16, 2025

Soul Sighting

Soul Sighting is a participatory futuring toolkit that reclaims imagination as a cultural and emotional practice. It unfolds in three phases: Soul Searching, Soul Sensing, and Soul Speaking. Participants surface weak signals, intuitive cues, and lived experience to co-create shared insights. Drawing from narrative foresight, deep transitions theory, and causal layered analysis, the project challenges data-driven prediction by centering story, feeling, and reflection. It helps democratize foresight and opens space for plural futures to emerge—futures that are felt, shared, and rooted in the everyday. Soul Sighting is not a forecasting tool. It is a practice of building muscle for collective imagination, strengthened through care, play, and dialogue.

Project Details

  • Class: Communication Systems Studio
  • Instructor: Ruth Schmidt | Jessica Meharry