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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AI and Sleepless Nights

ID professor Laura Forlano comments on the use of algorithms in medical devices

By Kristin Gecan

April 16, 2020

Laura Forlano

In “The Danger of Intimate Algorithms,” ID Associate Professor Laura Forlano recounts her own experience with sleep deprivation while using Medtronic’s MiniMed 670G, an automatic insulin pump and sensor system. She points to how a current lack of checks and balances makes this situation possible.

“Unlike drug makers,” Forlano writes, “Companies that make medical devices are not required to conduct clinical trials in order to evaluate the side effects of these devices prior to marketing and selling them.”

At Public Books, she calls for change:

“
As companies design the next generation of “smart” medical devices, the government must require them to more seriously consider the social, cultural, and psychological impacts of their inventions as potential risks. In this case, there is no point in fixing the body at the expense of degrading the mind. And, metaphorically, if you cannot sleep, you cannot dream. If we are to reimagine our algorithmic systems as responsible innovations that serve to support liberatory and just societies, we must have the capacity to dream.

Read on to find three suggestions she makes to promote agency and equity as algorithmic systems become ever more embedded in our society.

“The relevance of documenting injustice and dehumanization at the intersection of artificial intelligence, design, disability, and health care,” Forlano later adds, “is ever more urgent if we are to craft more equitable futures.”

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