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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ID Workshop Leads to a New Dementia Support Website

UChicago Medicine Launches Digital Toolkit Based on Tomoko Ichikawa's Communication Design Workshop

June 22, 2023

Drawing of a family

UChicago Medicine has launched the Centering Our Values website, a new platform aimed at improving care and equity for African Americans affected by dementia. The initiative is particularly crucial as African Americans face a higher risk of developing dementia compared to their white counterparts, yet are often underrepresented and underserved in healthcare resources.

The project originated from a collaboration between ID and UChicago Medicine, beginning with Tomoko Ichikawa‘s Communication Design Workshop in fall 2019. The workshop team created a 56-page workbook for caregivers in the African American community. After additional testing with dementia caregivers, the research findings were analyzed and implemented by Gauri Bhatt (MDes 2022) in 2021.

The culmination of this work is now available to the public at Centering Our Values. This digital resource offers educational materials, a hands-on toolkit, and worksheets designed to provide guidance and support for caregivers.

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