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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Entrepreneurship & Finance Food

The Merchant & Muse

January 19, 2015

ID students designed and prototyped a new service which curates high-quality ingredients and recipes, and delivers to your doorstep.

Synopsis

When we can get virtually anything we want at a moment’s notice, why is it still so difficult to get the ingredients we need to make the dinner we want, right when we want it?

The Merchant and Muse is a new grocery service dedicated to answering this question. It is, most simply, a neighborhood market on wheels (i.e. a truck), carrying a curated set of high-quality, ever-evolving ingredients. The Merchant and Muse combines the quality and control of grocery shopping, with the spontaneity of ordering delivery—allowing for easy, impromptu cooking tonight.

Problem

Why is it still so difficult to get the ingredients we need to make the dinner we want
– right when we want it?

Proposed User Experience

Existing food services fail because they either require planning and time, or they require giving up the control of touching, feeling and squeezing your own groceries. The team’s mission was to re-unite these two attributes under one service that ultimately makes it easier for people to cook dinner tonight.

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Faculty

  • April Starr

Tags:

Students

Adam Panza
Andrew Raines
Paul Sheetz
Katherine Schtevie

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