After Making and Thinking, Now the Doing

There’s a final tradition at every AIGA conference I love attending, and one that most people who were chugging 60oz “bottomless” beers on Beale Street probably didn’t make it to—the Sunday morning Town Hall. At this intimate gathering, AIGA staff and board members take questions about the state of the organization. It’s a great chance to not only reflect back upon the programming of the past few days, but to get answers about the future, right from the source.

Ric Grefé opening the discussion at the Town Hall meeting

As AIGA executive director Ric Grefé noted first, there was one fact quite obvious to everyone in attendance at Make/Think: Registration was lower for this conference compared to two years ago, down about 30%. Only about 1300 designers attended this year’s conference compared to over 2000 in Denver. But actually, that lower number is standard for all conferences this year. AIGA believes this is part of a general shift towards smaller conferences—the big 4000 person conferences are gone. “It’s not because we can’t attract them,” says Ric, but because of economic issues and changing cultural and technological issues. But that doesn’t mean every big event will scale back. Design is a young profession and still needs to prove itself to the greater population, to show that design has cultural importance. And that’s why events like the AIGA Design Legends Gala, which honored mainstage speaker Carin Goldberg among others a few weeks ago, is important not only because it shows the relevance of the discipline, it actually raises quite a bit of money for AIGA.

But as conferences go, look for more specialized regional events like Compostmodern and the Y Conference, or ones like GAIN that can reach outside the design world into the business world and help bring understanding of the discipline to a wider audience. In light of the fact that not as many people can afford to attend a conference, AIGA has also stepped up their video production, so now look for “TED Talk quality” video online soon (awesome!). I, for one, think the scaling back of events like this is a good trend. Some conferences have gotten far too big. But what’s a good size? Ric Grefé considers this definition: “Where you can see the people you want to meet with, and then it’s small enough that you can still meet with them.” I think that was true for this year. Memphis felt just right when it came to numbers. The lines of designers who waited to talk to the most popular mainstage speakers, otherwise known as “The Two Stefans,” Sagmeister and Bucher, were long, but not overly long.

Talking to Stefan Sagmeister at the Design Observer party

When a speaker like Bennington College president Elizabeth Coleman gave one of the most talked about presentations at the conference, it’s obvious that education for both designers and at the K-12 level is a white-hot topic. Several people at the Town Hall asked for more educational support, and the AIGA design educators’ chair Louise Sandhaus, directed them to a new site, designeducators.aiga.org. In addition to the ongoing community conversations, Adobe and AIGA sponsor two education conferences every two years, and the next one will be Response/Ability on May 13-14 in Toledo, Ohio, followed by another one in Raleigh, NC in the fall. One question that was resonant throughout the conference was how to encourage all designers to begin and sustain the ever-important self-initiated work at a very young age. Both Daniel Eatock‘s and Jill Greenberg‘s talks proved that some of the most fruitful and powerful work—as well as the most entertaining—comes out of this experimentation.

Daniel Eatock experimenting with students

In the sustainability realm, a new set of guidelines called the Living Principles was announced and launched Friday by the Center for Sustainable Design. This new set of principles is built around the idea is that sustainable criteria isn’t just environmental and it examines the various guidelines for other organizations that are also guiding social responsibility, economy, society and culture (the traditional “triple-bottom line” + cultural sustainability). “We’re trying to make sure that the U.S. design community is actually part of the global design community,” says Ric. “We’ve been so focused on economic success we’ve become isolated.” By publishing these standards, AIGA also hopes that they can help designers educate their clients. “This is what the profession expects from itself,” says Ric, but it can also be used to tell other corporations, “this is what you should expect from design.” This could push forth more of the work being done by people like R/GA’s Nick Law, who spoke about rich designed experiences with a social agenda for Nike and the Ad Council that doesn’t fit the traditional perception of “sustainability” but drives change in a positive way.

Just the fact that a strictly interactive figure like Google’s Marissa Mayer was so prominently represented at AIGA’s conference is a huge step in showing that the traditional graphic design limitations no longer apply to the organization. There seems to be a general concern about continuing to bring in people from outside industries that don’t identify with traditional print industries, or even how to attract people who don’t think of themselves as graphic designers. AIGA has resolved to include non-print practitioners but also pledges to focus on younger designers. “If we focus on older designers as the center of gravity we miss the changes that are inevitably coming,” says Ric. Not to say that the elders will be ignored:  One idea AIGA has considered is to have younger mentors for older designers. How fun would that be? I say that initiative should be headed up by power duo of designer Charles Harrison and current student Ethan Bodnar, who spoke together about designing in two different eras of the industry.

David Butler, Global Design Director, Coca-Cola

But design, as Coke’s David Butler reminded us, is only getting bigger, and designers will need to learn how to design across boundaries they never could have imagined before. AIGA is proud to be aligned with ICOGRADA, the international group of designers which allows them to share information and practices on a much larger scale. The Cross Cultural Design Group (XCD), and chair Zelda Harrison, looks for other opportunities to bring other countries and cultures into the design conversation. ICOGRADA’s summit will be held in China next week, where AIGA has a strong presence with their AIGA China office.

Finally, taking a cue from Roger Martin’s incredible talk about why designers make such good problem solvers, there are a group of designers working hard to create a real presence in design within the U.S. government. A National Design Policy would bring together designers working in all design government agencies to find out how they approach service design, possibly culminating in a conference. This happened in the ‘70s but it has lost momentum, so AIGA is hoping to be a major part of getting this group united, which can hopefully bring the high-level design thinking concept to be applied to policy in the government. As far as proving value to our own country, Design for Democracy is being used for election ballot redesign, and continues to be the greatest way to demonstrate how design can help society. In addition to the ballots, Design for Democracy is working on redesigning the veteran experience, as well as a “nutrition facts” standard for credit card contracts and mortgages.

AIGA President Debbie Millman addresses the Town Hall meeting participants.

While we only have a Town Hall meeting every two years, Ric reminded us, you’ve got our email addresses. And there’s a special focus on inclusiveness and connectivity from AIGA president Debbie Millman, who wants to explore having more meaningful conversations using social networks, a true embrace of technology using whatever tools we have on hand to make people feel like their voices are heard. And even Ric Grefé is on Twitter (although I don’t see a post yet, but I’m optimistic!). Just like 69-year-old former Stax Records chairman and recent joiner of Twitter Al Bell put it so eloquently in the opening talk:  “If we follow each other and keep communicating, good things could happen.”