In 2026, after nearly 90 years, the Institute of Design came under new management. 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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Past Event

Strategy World Tour: Hong Kong

December 7-9, 2015
Hong Kong

Visit grassroots mobile companies started by housewives in living rooms that have grown into large-scale logistics enterprises. Tour hacker spaces in Shenzhen. Meet Victor Lo, chairman of Gold Peak Industries, who is behind the creation of Hong Kong Design Center (HKDC), Asia’s largest design festival. Hear the story of Hotel Icon, a teaching and research hotel built for the School of Hotel and Tourism Management by Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Visit Police Married Quarters (PMQ), built in 1951 and reopened in 2010 as a site for creative industry uses. Discuss the implications of the increasing pace of industry with academics and business leaders at HKDC.


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About the Strategy World Tour


All of us are inundated by media accounts of how the rise of tech and manufacturing innovation, social innovation, the growth of the maker movement, and other forces are changing our world. However, we seldom get to meet the people and experience the places at the center of change. The Strategy World Tour will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the work of leaders in highly innovative organizations both large and small in five of the world’s centers of change.


Twenty individuals will be invited to join three-day tours between October 2015 and April 2016. During each visit, participants will have several intimate discussions about strategy with the CEOs who are driving design and innovation at public companies and with the founders of start-ups and social service organizations creating the next wave of innovation. The IIT Institute of Design Strategy World Tour will take participants to five transforming cites to experience innovation where it is most critical. The culminating event will be the Strategy Conference in Chicago in May.

Register