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 Resistance

By Terah Delancy

May 10, 2024

Exploring the parallels between general AI in policing and generative AI in design

This three-week visual prototyping-to-learn exercise challenged me to think critically about the use of general AI in facial recognition technology for policing while engaging in using generative AI tools to create design artifacts. This short exercise revealed that trust serves as a key, multilayered tension point of the technology that exists in both contexts.

How can marginalized groups, who have consistently been harmed by this technology, protect themselves from the negative consequences of it? Who should they trust?