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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Remembering Hattula Moholy-Nagy (1933–2024)

Daughter of ID Founder László Moholy-Nagy Has Died

December 9, 2024

Hattula Moholy-Nagy with photo of her father
Hattula Moholy-Nagy photographed by ID student Nathan Lerner in 1940

Hattula Moholy-Nagy photographed by ID student Nathan Lerner in 1940. Photo from the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.

Hattula Moholy-Nagy, anthropologist, artist, and daughter of László Moholy-Nagy, died on November 26, 2024. Her son, ID alum Andreas Hug (MDes 2004) shared the news with ID. Her full obituary can be found in the Chicago Tribune.

Born in Berlin in 1933, Hattula and her parents fled Nazi Germany for London in 1935. The family came to the US in 1937, when her father founded The New Bauhaus—today’s Institute of Design—in Chicago. She and the Moholy-Nagy Foundation have been instrumental in preserving Moholy’s legacy.

We spoke with Hattula on the occasion of the Bauhaus centenary in 2019, when the documentary film The New Bauhaus was released. She shared her belief that her father’s work can continue to shape the world for the better.

“
He truly believed that through good art and good design, you could tame industry and get it to work for you and have a better world. He believed one could have a better world.
—Hattula Moholy-Nagy

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