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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A Letter to the ID Community

Dean Denis Weil calls on ID community to commit to an antiracist agenda

June 5, 2020

51 Futures Studio: future framing. Community members leave responses to the future-framing statement.

Dear ID community,

George Floyd’s violent death in Minneapolis, following closely the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, demonstrates clearly the anguish and dangers Black Americans face due to structural racism. This same structural racism has led to the disproportionate death by COVID in our Black and brown communities.

I am calling on the ID community to come together and commit to an antiracist agenda in our teaching, our work, and our discussion. While this is needed more than ever in the US, it applies globally and hence has relevance to our entire ID community.

Courses by ID faculty members Laura Forlano, Jessica Jacobs, Chris Rudd, Carlos Teixeira, and others have given ID students the context, reflection, and tools to start imagining new, more equitable, and more cooperative infrastructures and futures. (Find Chris Rudd’s opening keynote from RSD8 this past fall, “Community-Empowered Systems Change,” here). As our students start their summer projects this week, I have asked them to please apply what they have learned to make real change a priority.

I also encourage us all—faculty, students, staff, alumni, and friends—to support each other in these difficult times. And I will be in touch with news about more ways to make that happen over the summer, including sharing some of the civic design approaches, frameworks, and methods that we have introduced at ID to our broader community over the summer.

Now is the time to act. As our founder, László Moholy-Nagy, wrote:

“
Be a pioneer on the vast and unbroken territories of our period, where every action could lead to creative solutions. If one doubts that an individual can ever achieve so much, it may be that it will not be individuals alone, but working communities who do.

Denis Weil (MDes 2001)
Dean, IIT Institute of Design