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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Faculty

Marty Thaler Receives Excellence in Teaching Award

Teaching Has Shaped Generations of ID Students

May 16, 2024

Martin Thaler shown with students upon receiving Illinois Tech Excellence in Teaching Award

Beloved ID faculty member Martin Thaler has received the 2024 Excellence in Teaching Award for the Institute of Design from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Marty, who joined ID faculty full-time in 2008, is Associate Professor of Product and Environment Design. He is a faculty co-lead on ID’s annual End of Year Show, leads ID’s Taiwan Immersion, and helps non-designers to think like designers through ID’s Foundation sequence.

Hear Marty discuss Foundation in Season 2, Episode 1 of ID’s With Intent podcast.

“
Building physical prototypes is a way of thinking as a designer, whether you end up designing objects, communications, strategies or services.
—Martin Thaler, Associate Professor of Product and Environment Design
Marty Thaler

Marty Thaler

Marty is the co-author, with Sung Jang, of 101 Things I Learned in Product Design School (Crown, 2020), and a contributor to Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, 2019).

He previously led multidisciplinary teams at IDEO’s Chicago office for companies in the consumer electronics, medical, and furniture industries. His past clients include Bang & Olufsen, DaimlerChrysler, Lilly, McDonald’s, Motorola, and View-Master.

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