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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Introducing Season 3 of With Intent

Explore Designs Featured in ID’s Award-Winning List of 100 Great Designs of Modern Times

October 1, 2024

With Intent Podcast
Smaller subway map interlaced/juxtaposed with Lifestraw in use

Thamer Abanami and Albert Shum host Season 3 of With Intent as ID’s 2024 Latham Fellows. Design collaborators for more than 15 years, the co-hosts’ longstanding relationship sets the stage for insightful discussions on design and its impact on society. Listen to the trailer.

“
Each of these designs has embedded in it a big question or unexpected insights that we think would be inspiring for anyone interested in design, engineering, business, or impact.
—Thamer Abanami

The List

Season 3 explores designs featured in ID’s award-winning list of 100 Great Designs of Modern Times, published with Fortune magazine in 2020.

 

100 Great Designs of Modern Times

In 2020, ID and Fortune magazine collaborated to produce the a list of the 100 greatest designs of modern times. The collaboration brought together insights about the evolving role of design in today’s world.

Fortune and ID first collaborated on such a list in 1959, and though some designs made both the original and the 2020 list, there were important differences in the kinds of designs that we now consider “great.”

The hosts use notable designs from this list as a backdrop across six episodes:

  1. Great Design #28: Massimo Vignelli’s New York City Subway Map (1972),
  2. Great Design #53: LifeStraw water filters (2005),
  3. Great Design #54: Raspberry Pi computer (2012),
  4. Great Design #69: Zipline’s drone-based logistics platform (2014),
  5. Great Design #6: the OXO Good Grips Peeler (1990),
  6. Great Design #36: the ClearRx prescription bottle redesign (2005)

After each conversation, listeners come away with a better understanding of each design and the lessons it offers in innovation and responsibility. Check out the trailer.

100 Great Designs of Modern Times, 2020

Announcing ID’s 2024–25 Latham Fellows

What Do the Volkswagen Beetle, an OXO Vegetable Peeler, and Spotify Have in Common?