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 the Second Season of ID’s With Intent Podcast

Discover Where Design Is Headed Next

February 15, 2023

Jarrett Fuller
With Intent Podcast

The first episode of our second season of ID’s podcast, With Intent, is available now.

Listeners to With Intent‘s first season will note that this season has a new host—Jarrett Fuller, host of the Scratching the Surface podcast. This season, Jarrett is helping ID to write our most recent chapter in celebration of our 85th anniversary.

Marty Thaler and Tomoko Ichikawa

Marty Thaler and Tomoko Ichikawa

In Season 2, Jarrett hosts conversations about the state of design today, asking our faculty big questions—about ID’s Bauhaus lineage, whether human-centered design is enough, and how one becomes a designer and learns design.

The first episode, How Does Someone Become a Designer? features Tomoko Ichikawa, Associate Professor of Visual Communication, and Marty Thaler, Associate Professor of Product Design. Tomoko and Marty discuss ID’s Foundation sequence—possibly the strongest tie that ID has today with its history as The New Bauhaus. (Foundation at ID makes it possible for nondesigners to enter our graduate school.)

Jarrett is the 2022–23 Latham fellow at the Institute of Design.

Tune into With Intent to discover where ID is taking design next.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and then do us a favor and rate and share the episode.

“
Design isn't really for design. Design is for the world. So design—it always works with other disciplines.
—Tomoko Ichikawa

With Intent — Season 1 Trailer

Utopianism and technology with Morgan Ames

Hope and Action with Mushon Zer-Aviv