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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Chris Rudd interviewed on Scratching the Surface

ID professor in conversation with Jarrett Fuller

March 17, 2022

Chris Rudd on Scratching the Surface

ID Clinical Professor of Community-Driven Design Chris Rudd talks to designer and Scratching the Surface podcast host Jarrett Fuller about how he came to design, teaching at ID, and design’s relationship to business.

He also considers how co-design can be manipulative—and what design needs most now:

“
I used to think we could just reconfigure the tools and then create drastically different outcomes. As I continued to practice I realized that was no longer true, that the tools, the methods, will always bring us to a particular point. And so design as a field needs new tools.