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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Alumni

Janice Wong, Senior Design Researcher at Amazon’s UX Lab

From indie music fest to Amazon

August 3, 2020

Janice Wong's desk and wall with post its

On ID’s Medium publication, Anna Olsztynska (MDM 2021) talks to Janice Wong (MDes + MBA 2013) about her path from print designer at a Montreal indie music festival to her current role as senior design researcher at Amazon’s UX Lab.

”At POP [music festival], I had the chance to use design to shape the festival experience for festival goers, and as a Torontonian, I was especially interested in thinking about how to design a better experience for people who weren’t from Montreal.. Looking back, I see that these were my first forays into service design and experience design, even though I didn’t have the language back then to articulate it as such.

Over time, I got itchy to use my design skills to do something different, which is how I started to think about grad school.”

About her current work, Janice describes the satisfaction of compelling “clients or partners to suspend their disbelief about how we might do something and then delivering on it.” She continues:

“In my work as a consultant, I appreciated those opportunities to make a good first impression of our practice for people who had never been exposed to human-centered design or design research before. Now at Amazon, I’m surrounded by people who set the bar very high, and the challenge/expectation is to continue elevating my craft by experimenting and tweaking with the methods I use to do my work. As just one example, since we’ve all been stuck working from home, I’ve been thinking about to better facilitate remote, asynchronous workshops and collaboration.“

Read the full interview on Medium.