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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Celebrating the Release of Bauhaus Futures

Book considers future influence of Bauhaus

By Andrew Connor

October 31, 2019

Bauhaus Futures cover

“What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today?”

That question is central to Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, 2019), a new book edited by IIT Institute of Design Associate Professor Laura Forlano—along with Carnegie Mellon University’s Molly Wright Steenson and University of Southern California’s Mike Ananny—and published by MIT Press to coincide with the famed German art school’s centenary.

On Tuesday, November 12, Forlano will participate in a panel hosted at the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship featuring Bauhaus Futures contributors Martin Thaler, studio professor at ID; Jessica Charlesworth, a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Tim Parsons, an associate professor at SAIC. Moderated by J. Smyk (MDes 2020), the panel will discuss themes prominent in the book, from the Bauhaus’s fundamental design principles to modern ethical questions about design, labor, and technology. The event is free and open to the public, and interested individuals can register here.

Through a series of essays penned by some of the foremost authorities in the field of design, Bauhaus Futures considers the influences of the Bauhaus and how it can continue to shape design today, while addressing issues such as gender, race, class, and sexuality that were once ignored. The Bauhaus’s experimentation with technology, open-mindedness to new ideas, and integration of research in teaching and practice remain relevant, if not essential, to approaching society’s problems today.

“
The Bauhaus is a way of thinking through things, through pedagogy, through design. The Bauhaus is so successful as an idea—as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said—because ‘only an idea spreads so far.’
—Laura Forlano

A video of the panel discussion in Chicago on November 12 is available here.

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