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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Building Your Organization’s Future

A way to think about design and design roles in your organization.

By Lead with Purpose Research Team

February 3, 2020

Faculty building out the End of year Show at ID.

The Institute of Design released the Lead with Purpose report to highlight design’s central role in realizing executive vision. 

Consider a home remodel. Most architects create schematic drawings. Other architects and tradespeople can see these two-dimensional drawings and immediately translate them into 3-D spaces in their minds. But most other people can’t.  So, if you’re building a house and have only these drawings to go on, you’re hoping the outcome is what you ultimately want your house to be, but you don’t really know. You are trusting others to be your voice in the process of building your house.

It’s a democracy movement that design should lead.

But let’s say that the floor plan is put into a virtual reality environment that you, the owner of that space, can physically walk through. This is a higher prototype, compared to the schematic drawing, and now you can see and experience your space in its 3-D form before it is built. Now you can form an educated opinion, a high-level certainty about whether this new space will meet all your needs. You are empowered to make changes before the space is built. Instead of feeling restricted by design elitism and the esoteric knowledge of the person you hired, you are personally empowered through the increasing capabilities of design methods and tools.

It’s a democracy movement that design should lead. Prototyping and visualizing how ideas are coming to life is the secret sauce of design and the reason designers are well positioned to define and facilitate the Intent-to-Effect Pathway.

 


Explore the full 2020 ID Report in our Resource Library. You can also download the PDF.