End of Year Celebration 2024: Graduation Remarks and EOYS Opening

ID’s End of Year Celebration highlights the work from the 2023–24 academic year and recognizes this year's graduates. Beginning with remarks from ID alum Melody Roberts (MDes 1998) and student speaker Jorge Martínez Arana (MDes + MBA 2023), the event also launches our annual End of Year Show (EOYS), an exhibition of recent student work. Tickets are available for either or both segments of the program (details below). Commencement is a separate ceremony on Saturday, May 11.

EOYS 2024's theme of Boundless: Design Beyond Limits reveals a design landscape of interconnected actions, systems, and tensions that can yield infinite possibilities. In charting new courses at an accelerated rate, we can transform today into an imaginative and truly boundless tomorrow.

Join us to honor ID students' creativity, collaboration, and achievements!

ID’s 2024 End of Year Celebration is part reflection, part exhibition, and part reception:

6pm: Graduation Remarks & Reflections (Streaming Available)

• Shari Jones, Director of Student Success, ID
• Anijo Mathew, Dean, ID
• Distinguished Student Speaker Jorge Martínez Arana (MDes + MBA 2023)
• Alum Speaker Melody Roberts (MDes 1998)

7:30pm: End of Year Show (EOYS) Opening Remarks: Boundless

• Introduction from ID faculty Tomoko Ichikawa and Marty Thaler
• Self-Led Tours

8pm: Reception

Join us as we toast our recent graduates and celebrate the work that all ID students have achieved over the 2023–24 academic year.

(MDes 1998) is Cofounder and CEO of Liv Labs, a venture-backed consumer healthtech startup developing everyday ways to treat urinary incontinence. Melody has more than 25 years' experience in innovating the everyday—from feeding families to keeping memories. She originated the design research and strategy function at Smart Design in New York City, led innovation programs for Silicon Valley’s IDEO clients, including Hewlett-Packard, the NSA, and McDonald’s. Melody holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a master’s degree from the Institute of Design.

Tickets

Portions of this event will be available both in-person and online as listed below. Note our different ticket types:

1. In Person: Graduation Remarks + EOYS + Reception (6p CST)
2. Virtual: Graduation Remarks (6p CST)
3. In Person: EOYS + Reception (7:30p CST)

Our EOYS website will launch on May 10 at 6p CST. View past years here.

At the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech, we look at the world in new ways to create the change we hope to see in it. Since our founding by Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy in 1937, we’ve continually turned design into a powerful tool anyone can use to transform the systems that shape our lives — from cities, education, and finance to food, healthcare, and technology.

We’re the only US design school devoted completely to graduate students, and the first to offer a PhD. By uniting science and rigor with creativity and rapid iteration, we’re recognized around the globe as pioneers in human-centered design, systems design, and other methods that apply design to the real world.

It’s through these unique approaches that students, communities, and corporations learn to observe the systems they’re surrounded by — and envision the new worlds they can build from them. Here, learners and leaders discover what design makes possible, how it enables us to adapt with the speed, scale, and complexity of life, and how to anticipate change and the impact of our actions. Most importantly, we discover what it means to imagine—then create—brighter futures for us all.

Learn more about ID at id.iit.edu.

Host or Publisher Institute of Design (ID)