Work

Impact by Design, published in 2026, builds on Season 3 of the With Intent podcast and ID's 2020 list with Fortune: "100 Great Designs of Modern Times." Authors Thamer Abanami and Albert Shum examine five great designs and reveal what they have in common: the shared patterns that allowed them to make such great impact.

To make the most of resources at the Institute of Design and hone a consistent message, I created, and now nurture and lead, a content ecosystem approach. Every piece of content, from across the Graduate School, Action Labs, and Executive Academy, becomes part of a unified editorial presence. The principle—no waste, no siloed effort—moves content across formats and channels. A research paper becomes a podcast episode becomes a glossary entry becomes a social post becomes an AI-indexed resource that compounds in reach over time.

I built the Shapeshift platform in 2019, at the moment of the Bauhaus centennial, to celebrate the distinct Bauhaus lineage of two units at the Illinois Institute of Technology: the Institute of Design, founded by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and the College of Architecture, with its influential Mies van der Rohe legacy. In 2022, Shapeshift again drew attention to Chicago's design headquarters. And in 2025, the Shapeshift Summit convened design leaders on the topic of Responsible AI.

Published in 2024, Taking Responsibility in the Age of AI came out of original research emerging from a graduate design class led by ID faculty Mark Jones. Through developmental editing and a collaborative network of voices, this institutional report became a timely, digestible record of the value of design at a moment of extreme AI hype.

Through a partnership with Chicago Humanities, I expanded Illinois Tech's reputation and visibility in Chicago, putting its faculty in conversation with high-profile speakers like Ruha Benjamin, Walter Hood, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Robin Givhan, John Maeda, Nate Silver, and Richard Thaler. Inspired by a range of great thinkers with the backdrop of Illinois Tech's Mies Campus, Chicagoans discover one of their city's best-kept secrets.

I led the Institute of Design's complete rebrand with COLLINS and its website transformation with Self Aware. The resulting work received seven industry awards, including a D&AD Graphite Pencil (Branding), wins at DesignWeek (Identity Design/Rebrand), AIGA (Brand & Identity Systems), TDC (Brand Identity System), and Communication Arts (Integrated Branding Programs), plus recognition from the ADC Awards and Creative Review. My name also appears on a US design patent (D1,090,688, issued August 2025) protecting the ornamental design of the custom typeface created for the rebrand.

ID's 85th anniversary approached, but there was not a clear sense of its trailblazing history nor how its future direction connected to that history. In partnership with the Design Museum of Chicago and ID graduate students, we produced the largest physical exhibition ever crafted from the Illinois Institute of Technology archives. Still on view at the Mies Campus, the physical exhibition became digital through a partnership with Google Arts & Culture on the occasion of the international Bauhaus centennial.

Now in the top 15% of all active podcasts globally (Buzzsprout Global Analytics), I launched With Intent as both a new podcast platform and approach to ID's Latham Fellowship. New Latham fellows now host each new season, defining an arc and editorial approach with me as executive producer and extending the podcast content through projects: Where Must Design Go Next? from Jarrett Fuller and Impact by Design from Thamer Abanami and Albert Shum. With three seasons and 30 episodes, the show has now generated over 11,000 lifetime downloads.

I led the Institute of Design's research and media partnership with Fortune for its 100 Great Designs list and longform feature. In the great tradition of Fortune lists, ID's 2020 list (our first since 1959) took up where predecessors had left off, distilling crowd-sourced information into a new list and establishing new criteria for determining what makes for "great" design in the 21st century. New designs (Spotify, the OXO peeler, Zipline) joined midcentury stalwarts (Futura typeface, the geodesic dome, Eames chair), helping put concrete examples behind what is meant by "design" today, good or otherwise.

Lead with Purpose, published in 2020, became the first in a series of institutional reports from ID. It's significant for its elucidation of ID's hallmark stance on design vis-à-vis business—particularly how design can be the means by which executive vision becomes reality—and for the corporate partners, from Salesforce to Capital One, that helped to produce it.