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 Restoration Design Manifesto

By Eva M. Althaus

May 11, 2023

A proposal for direction of efforts toward justice, equity, and the indefinite flourishing of life in all ecosystems

The biggest lesson I learned from the ”Politics of Design” is that design is never neutral. The elements we integrate and leave out create a statement to others. Through this class, I developed the practice of reflexivity and crafted my first attempt at a point of view or stand to whom I want to be as a designer in the context we live in.

Reflecting on the world we live in today, where the pandemic washed away our cognition of normality, possibilities and impossibilities. This world with a pressing clock requiring action from every single one of us to rescue our planet. Recognizing today’s opportunity and momentum to act, not only redesigning but ‘making new’.

I present ”The Restoration Design Manifesto” as a tool for Designers to think with greater discernment of what innovation is in a world with history, habits, and baggage. This manifesto is a new lens that encourages designers to incorporate virtues as indicators of ”good design” and promotes ”healing” and ”restoring” as the outcome for the well-being of all.

Project Details

  • Class: The Politics of Design
  • Instructor: Jessica Meharry

Eva Althaus

MDM 2023