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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The Missing Middle

In February 2025, 42 healthcare designers and physician leaders from across the US and Canada convened at the Institute of Design for Level Up. 

Post-event, participants formed writing groups and developed their ideas with support from the Equitable Healthcare Lab.

The following pre-publication is one output of a Level Up writing group, released for community discussion and review.

Pre-Publication

The Missing Middle

The Missing Middle:
Why US Health Systems Need a Development Capability

By Gary Waymire, MArch; Kim Erwin, MDes;
Jan Yeager, MDes; Aimee Feuser, MS; and Saurabha Bhatnagar, MD

Most US health systems rely on quality improvement processes designed for incremental change. But today’s challenges—AI, value-based care, workforce shortages—require something different: a development capability that can prototype, test, and launch new solutions before rolling them out system-wide.

This paper from ID’s Equitable Healthcare Lab argues that hospitals need a “missing middle”—teams of designers, engineers, and researchers dedicated to translating strategy into real-world implementation. It’s the difference between fixing what’s broken and building what comes next.

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