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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Design’s Role in the Future of the Power Grid

ID faculty in conversation with Gretchen Bakke for the Lucas J. Daniel Series in Sustainable Systems

By Andrew Connor

January 22, 2021

For its third annual Lucas J. Daniel Perspective in Sustainable Systems, the Institute of Design invited cultural anthropologist and writer Gretchen Bakke to speak on the complexity of America’s electricity grid and the role that systems design can play in its improvement.

Bakke is the author of The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future. In the book, she details the history of America’s electrical grid and its increasing deterioration and instability. Not only is a lack of maintenance making the system less reliable, it’s limited in its ability to work with modern renewable sources of electricity, inhibiting our nation’s ability to transition to green energy sources.

Joining Bakke are ID faculty Weslynne Ashton and Carlos Teixeira, as well as Illinois Institute of Technology professor Mohammad Shahidehpour, director of the Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation. Together they discuss the social aspects affecting the grid, as well as the role designers might play in creating a more robust, sustainable, and equitable power infrastructure.

The talk also kicked off a spring Sustainable Solutions Workshop led by Teixeira on the future of the grid, which will go one step further in attempting to solve that tricky systems design problem. In it, ID students will explore ways in which designers can incorporate renewables and principles of the circular economy into an improved grid system, producing concepts and prototypes by the end of the semester.

“
One traditional model of thinking about electric grids is as a distributor of electricity for local consumption. It is a model of mass production and mass consumption that typified the twentieth century. But the advent of microgrids powered by local sources of renewable energy opens up the opportunity for rethinking the grid as a local marketplace for buying and selling clean energy. Design expertise is critical for imagining the socio-environmental and technical systems these microgrids could promote.
—Carlos Teixeira

The discussion took place on Wednesday, January 27 at noon, and the recording is available.

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Figure 1. Underlying structure of the research approach.

Infrastructuring the Circular Economy

Flag Calumet prototype on Illinois Tech Campus

Redeveloping Brownfields with Flag Calumet

Carlos Teixeira

Carlos Teixeira Named Charles L. Owen Professor in Design