How Do We Define Quality Design Work at ID?

The Institute of Design celebrated the end of the 2025–2026 academic year with a new kind of student show. This year’s Annual Collection was a curated exhibition with a clear purpose: demonstrate what quality work looks like at ID.

Faculty selected 15 projects to represent the range of work happening at ID, whether communication design or product design, systems design or interaction design, or, in most cases, some combination of these and the many other skills and types of expertise that students build here.

Each large-format poster featured in the exhibit contains specific information:

• Project description
• Why it’s good: attributes of quality
• Why it matters: impact signals

What connects them all is attention to context. At ID, where we’ve pioneered human-centered design, we believe attending to the context in which the design work is conducted and created is paramount. We pride ourselves in caring for the ultimate “user,” whether that’s an individual, a particular group, or an organization.

What this means is that our work is tested with the people it’s for—nurses testing a new whiteboard format, pathologists piloting a diagnostic interface, City of Chicago departments shaping a waste-diversion strategy—rather than validated in the abstract. It’s also expected to survive contact with real constraints: regulatory limits inside a healthcare system, budget and staffing realities for a small business, the operational needs of a municipal partner. And a number of this year’s projects extend past the classroom entirely, whether that’s a nurse-endorsed toolkit already implemented at a hospital, a framework built for reuse by other cities and institutions, or research accepted into academic and industry venues like CHI (the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) or Fast Company‘s Innovation by Design Awards.

Several projects also focus explicitly on equity, including technical assistance for underserved agricultural producers and career-identity tools built with marginalized youth in mind.

Collectively, these examples demonstrate our desire for design to thrive at the level of Richard Buchanan’s Third and Fourth Order, transcending beyond traditional design of artifacts to impact systems, experiences, and organizations.

As Illinois Tech undergoes radical transformation, we’re reminded of the story ID has built over the past 89 years. The Institute of Design has always demanded paths for the betterment of individuals’ lives. We know that ID students will continue to carry this philosophy forward. It’s in our DNA.