Welcome back to another season of the AIGA Design Podcast.
I'm Li Shan Huang, Co, executive director of learning and
programs here at AIGA, the professional association for
Design. Hello everyone and I am Julia
Donatello, Design Competitions and Event Manager at AIGA.
So we thought that we would do an episode without an invited
guest, with just me and Julia to chat with you all.
It's been a while. So we like to reintroduce
ourselves, who we are, what the show is about, but also talk
about what is new for the season with our theme, eyes on design,
and the kind of nuances and different facets of that.
So why don't we start with just talking a little bit about
history and background? I can start by just talking
about the podcast itself because I started it before Julia
started working here. I've been working at AIGA since
the end of 2018. We launched this podcast at the
very end of 2019. Originally it was called Design
Future Now and it was meant to be part of AIGA but a spin off
brand. That just gave us some space to
be experimental, to really focus on what the future is of design,
like what the present moment was back in 2019.
This is just before the pandemic started.
And to really talk to design practitioners and critics and
professors to really think about like, OK, where is this
profession going and how do we prepare?
And it was really building off of AIG as design futures
research work that was published in 2018 as well.
And we were taking it to different design schools and to
design teams to really talk through all of that.
And then Fast forward a little bit, we had a previous executive
director who then started a show called Design Adjacent, which is
on the same feed. So you can listen to those old
episodes. And then we decided to just keep
things simple and rename the show the AIG Design Podcast a
few seasons ago. And this is where we're at.
And Julia joined about a year ago, right?
Yeah, it's been actually a year and a half.
And so for for the folks who don't know me yet, I, I am, I
oversee the two main competitions, competitions for
AIJ SO50 books, 50 covers, which is our book design competition.
Every year we award 50 books that are the winners and 50
covers that are the winners. And the other competition is
called 365 AIG Year in Design. This one is a little bit more
broad. We have up to 18 categories to
choose from, from different types of designs.
So we have branding, we have immersive design, service design
and social design and AI, as as well as a new category that we
just launched last year. And we're in the process of
cooking and designing new competitions this year.
So if you are not following our channels yet, please do so, so
you can be up to date on the upcoming news.
Thanks for that teaser. And for folks who are maybe
unfamiliar with AIGA or you're newer to AIGA, we are the oldest
professional association for design here in the US, although
we know that we have listeners and members across the world.
We were founded in the early 1900s, nineteen 14 as the
American Institute of Graphic Arts.
We've since grown to be this umbrella organization for
different kinds of designers, communication designers, product
designers, service designers, interaction designers,
transdisciplinary designers, wherever you are.
Our mission really is to bring the world to designers and
designers to the world and advocate for design as a craft,
as a profession, as a vital cultural force.
And so we've tried to do that on the show with the folks that we
feature in terms of design practitioners, educators,
critics, authors, and we really want to expand that as we talk
about this. Year's theme.
I think it's also great to share if you know someone that would
be a great fit for this podcast that would be interested,
interested in joining as a a participant, do reach out to us,
send their names so we can invite them to join our our
conversation here. Yeah, we're always open to have
some recommendations from the community.
Yeah, you can DM us on social media.
You can find AIGA at AIGA Design on
instagram.linkedinoryoucanalsoemailuspodcast@aiga.org. Go to our website, aiga.org.
You can sign up to our newsletter there to be the first
to know about new episodes and subscribe wherever you get
podcasts. We're also on YouTube, if you're
watching this on video before we get into talking about Eyes on
Design, which is our new theme and unified editorial vision for
AIGO. Just kind of bringing back
something for the past and reimagining it.
I thought maybe it was worth reintroducing ourselves or
telling a little bit more about ourselves too, and our
backgrounds just to help listeners understand, like where
we're coming from when we're interviewing guests and bringing
our own perspectives. Do you want to start Julia?
Yeah, sure, sure. Well, everyone.
So I am originally from Brazil. I have an undergrad in marketing
and I have worked for many years in the consumer packed goods
industry, a little bit of pharmaceutical as well, mostly
in the roles of marketing and consuming sites.
And then I moved to New York to pursue a master degree called
Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons.
And then after that IA little bit after that, I joined the
AIG. So I'm happy to be in the new
format, working with this small but very mighty team and
designing new programming and content for the community.
Awesome. Yeah, we're so lucky to have you
here on the team, Julia. And yeah, bit more about myself.
As I said before, I'm Co Executive Director of learning
and programs. I oversee all of our programming
at AIG, and we're really focused on helping designers build their
crafts and build their communities in collaboration
with our local chapters. But really what we're doing at
the national level is producing the show, bringing different
guests on the show to give them a platform to really highlight
what they're doing as design practitioners, as educators, as
design critics. And also we have an annual
conference that you'll be hearing more about as we go
through the season. This year AIGA is a member
supported non profit organization.
So we don't have any sponsors for the show.
We welcome them, but for now we are member supported as about
becoming a member of AIGA. You are supporting the show.
You were supporting the entire design community there, but in
terms of myself, you know, I started AIGA actually working
part time as manager of design education, really liaising
between AIGA and design educators.
I'm a design educator myself. I currently teach at SVA, the
School of Visual Arts, and at Parsons, but I've taught at NYU
and Emerson College, College of Staten Island in the past.
And I also have a background as a practitioner.
So I got my start after grad school at NYUI, worked at a
creative agency in New York called Purpose, and then started
my own practice called FUSA with my now husband, David Colby
Reed. And so kind of bringing together
practice and education and now it gets a design programming and
really connect the community and highlight the amazing things
that people are doing in design. We've been teasing it for a
while. So let's just get to the the
meat of things. Eyes on Design is our new
unified vision for programming here at AIGA in 2026 at the
national level, international level.
We have this show which we've been doing since 2019.
For the last couple of years we've been integrating the theme
of this show to the theme of our national conference.
So last year we were exploring design and performance and that
was also the theme of our conference in LA in October, and
we'll be doing the same here. The name Eyes on Design is a
reference to our legacy publication, the ION Design
magazine that ran from 2015 to 2022 and then also culminated in
a book of collected essays and writings from that online
magazine, which also did some print editions as well.
And we'd like to bring it back, maybe eventually bring back the
magazine as well. But for now, we are bringing it
back as what we're calling a conversation first platform.
So really making Eyes on Design, starting with this podcast, but
also on social media, on our newsletter through these three
lenses. Well, which we'll go through,
but there's the critical eye, the connecting eye, and the
future eye. Yeah.
And I think it's great to share a little bit of how we're
structuring the these conversations with the
participants here. We're trying to tackle each of
these eyes almost as if it's a block or a chapter within the
episode. Maybe I'll share a little bit of
what I understand with what we expect when we mean connecting.
I so I think exploring the interconnectedness of design in
in various forms. So connecting with other
disciplines and also the impact on human, human communities.
So very much connecting with a broader ecosystem that design is
placed and highlighting the cross disciplinary
collaboration. So folks working really in the
intersection of different fields and yeah, that's the idea I see
with the connecting eye. Yeah, definitely.
And I think it's a way to build on the legacy of Design
Adjacent, which is the previous one of the previous incarnations
of this show, recognizing that design is inherently liminal,
which basically means that it's design and something else,
right? We work in a context of design
and business here at AIG. It's design and a non profit,
design and politics, design and medicine.
You know, there's all sorts of connections.
Designers are often working at this intersection of different
disciplines and really connecting different kinds of
professionals and different kinds of experts.
And so there's something just inherently interdisciplinary
about what we do as designers. There's the critical eye as
well, which I think is really important just in terms of
design practice. You know, if you went to a
traditional design school, you likely had all sorts of design
crits, right? Design critiques, talking about
your work with your class, with your professors.
But also that's important as well as part of the discourse of
how do we criticize critique of the design work that's happening
that effects all of us, right? Whether it's social media
platforms or civic design or other products that are being
designed. But I think designers also have
a particular point of view in terms of using design as a
critical lens to examine the broader context, again, whether
it's politics of culture and other things.
And I think this is also a way to allow us to expand our reach
to folks who are maybe not self identified as designers.
As you mentioned, I think it's great to add that when we learn
how to do design critique, we first usually start with our own
critique, so understanding our personal journeys, our work, and
then look at the work that is happening in the world.
We also have to look at institutional legacies.
So what are types of design practice that organizations are
putting out there? I think it's also important to
learn how to do thoughtful critique and not like learning
how to give feedback is an important aspect of critique.
And so I think in this chapter here we are also interested in
exploring the status quo and also challenging assumption.
So very much trying to maybe bring a little bit more like
juicy topics that can be controversial.
So yeah, some provocations around different themes and
perspectives and opinions might come here in in the In the
Critical Eye chapter. Yeah, that's a great point,
Julia, about like examining our own subjectivity when it comes
to critique, right? We all have our own individual
tastes, but that's shaped by the culture that we grew up in, the
cultures we grew up in, our educational backgrounds.
And how does that reflect dominant cultural forces and
political forces? I actually have a academic
background in political science. I studied political science at
Harvard for my undergrad degree before I became a designer
through a roundabout career path.
But I think I see a lot of this critical eye as looking beyond
just the aesthetic part of design and the, the best
practices part of design and the formal part of design and really
analyzing like how design is reinforcing existing power
structures or maybe shifting power structures and looking at
it that way. And it's not necessarily just in
like politics in the narrow sense.
It could just be something like, you know, a new consumer app, a
new social media platform. Like how does that shift power
from, you know, who's owning it, who's controlling it, right?
Like all of these things have to do with power and how it shapes
our society, our behaviour, our culture, etcetera.
And then finally, there's the future.
I, as we mentioned, and this is really acknowledging that design
is inherently about future making, right?
So if you create something, whether it's a poster or a
product or a brand identity, you're putting something out in
the world that didn't exist before.
And so you're kind of changing the future in that sense, right?
You're doing something to the status quo that's different than
what it's been. And so all design, if you think
about it that way, is a form of future making.
We're doing something to move the needle in a direction
towards a future that hopefully we want, right, that is better
for people, better for the planet.
Thinking about the future is important.
We're acknowledging that our industry is going through a lot
right now, both in terms of the labour market, how companies are
laying people off, how they're shifting, how they structure
their design teams. The disruption from AII think
it's an unescapable topic and a controversial 1 again that
hopefully we can bring in different perspectives on that.
Yeah. And as you were saying, Lishan,
it reminded me of our conversation that we had in
another episode with Carissa and Scott in the previous season
that I think in their book, they say that any type of design
starts with imagination. And so for you to be able to to
design anything, you first need to start with men imagining how
this would look like. So I think that also is very
much connecting on how we can imagine the future to be.
Their book actually lives on my desk.
It's Assembling Tomorrow by Scott Dorley and Carissa Carter.
If you're listening to the audio only version of this, obviously
you can't see what I'm holding up on the screen, but I've
incorporated it into my classes both at Parsons and at SVA, so
it's really shaped how I've thought about design practice.
So yeah, those are the three eyes that we're looking through
to structure episodes, the connecting eye, the critical
eye, and the future eye. Again, we're still looking for
guests. We'd love to hear from you if
you want to pitch yourself or recommend somebody.
The other invitation here is for folks who are not yet following
us in our channels. Also subscribe to our
newsletter. We're going to continue this
conversation that we started in the podcast episodes to another
medium, which is the newsletter, so more of a writing format.
So we invite you all to join to subscribe to our newsletter to
see what we're discussing more there and also be so you can be
updated to everything else that we're planning in terms of
programming this year. So thank you for listening and
subscribing and liking and commenting all of those things
that we're supposed to say when we put content on the Internet.
But we also look forward to seeing you in person offline at
an AIG event in the near future as well.
That's all for this episode, but stay tuned.
We have another episode with an actual guest coming soon and the
whole season ahead of us. So here's to 2026.