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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Denis Weil Interviewed on Scratching the Surface

ID dean in conversation with Jarrett Fuller

February 12, 2021

Scratching the Surface podcast

ID dean Denis Weil talks to designer and Scratching the Surface podcast host Jarrett Fuller about his definition of design, the significance of being a graduate-only school for design (the only in the US), and what the maturing of the design profession can learn from the model of the finance profession.

They also cover Denis’s professional experience at McDonald’s and beyond, his successive interest in civic design, and how ID’s newest graduate program, the dual degree MDes + Master of Public Administration (MPA), came to be.

“
If you look at the job description of a public servant and a designer—we actually have the same job description. The difference is that we go about it in very different ways.
—Denis Weil