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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Infrastructuring the Circular Economy

By Kristin Gecan

April 24, 2020

Figure 1. Underlying structure of the research approach.

Energies has published “Infrastructuring the circular economy” by ID associate professor Carlos Teixeira, ID alum Andre Nogueira (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), Weslynne S. Ashton (IIT Stuart School of Business), and Elizabeth Lyon and Jonathan Pereira (Plant Chicago).

The paper demonstrates ID’s continuing work in reimagining civic infrastructures and developing new value models for a new era:

“
We developed a new framework and a model for considering and allocating the variety of resources that organizations utilize when creating value for themselves, society, and the planet. … The existing infrastructures shaping production and consumption systems are usually perceived as given and unchangeable. This is one of the reasons why contemporary CE [circular economy] practices are constrained by them.

Creating distributed governance through participatory action research (PAR), ID partnered with The Plant/Plant Chicago to promote equity and sustainability, and to scale Plant Chicago efforts:

“
This research project not only helped build design capacity among PC [Plant Chicago] staff, increasing their ability to embed principles of sustainability and equity into their innovation processes towards CE, but it also increased their confidence in tackling complex projects at a broader scale, beyond the facility boundaries. In the process of doing so, PC transitioned from an NGO that promoted CE through research and development at The Plant to one cultivating local circular economies across the City of Chicago by convening diverse perspectives that would not otherwise have a forum in the circular economy space.

Read the full paper published by Energies.

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Fig. 2. Systems dynamics maps are a key tool in the framework, enabling the visualization of variables governing the flow of different types of capital, feedback between variables and drivers and barriers in the system. Barriers are represented by variables that have a large number of inflow arrows as they require multiple types of resources from different variables. Drivers are represented by variables that have a larger number of outflow arrows as they exert greater influence on other variables in the system.

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