Veteran AIGAers either know for a fact or logically assume that the National office has been riding on a rough road lately, dragging a huge weight while running on fumes. A real real threat looms of losing the AIGA altogether. This has been only one of a few scary scenarios in recent years after the 5th Ave headquarters building was sold, over protests from some prominent members. Despite the continued robust activities of AIGA’s solvent regional chapters, National has glued so many disparate parts together that it is in a financially perilous place. AIGA has defined what graphic design is, was and will become; it is the repository of heritage and distributor of knowledge and has mostly handled it well. But its compass has been skewed (magnetic north has gone south). Despite the excellent stewardship during the COVID years of former executive director Bennie Johnson, who stepped down a year ago, many members and former members, certainly of my generation, have felt adrift, disengaged, disinterested, or all of the above.
Earlier in this post-COVID year the bi-annual National conference was announced—the first time an AIGA gathering of this scale would be held in New York City. I have been off the National board for two decades, and was no longer privy to inner-circle conversations, but I suspected (indeed believed) that this event was a hail Mary effort to restore some semblance of relevance for the AIGA in a design field that had already been redefined and is no longer represented by the term graphic arts. The conference seemed to be a last ditch means to boost falling membership numbers before hanging up the well kernned “Going Out of Business” sign.
Bringing the show to New York was a means to revive what had already ended. This National AIGA conference might have been a wake for our historic American Institute of Graphic Arts. Rather, it was a wake-up call—and to my great surprise, a loud and decidedly merry one at that.
The first smart decision was to appoint Bobby C. Martin Jr. from Apple and Jennifer Kinon, co-founder with Martin of Champions, to curate a pared-down two-day event. AIGA National couldn’t have chosen a better duo, both are savvy with solid organizational acumen (Jen was art director of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and Bobby had been the design director at Jazz at Lincoln Center and Noikia). Together they have excellent connections, fingers on the pulse of new designers, a network with global reach, and this was proven by their booking selections. To direct a cast of great (and many under represented) presenters, Debbie Millman was the host who shared on stage roles with Michael Bierut and Lisa Babb as “moderators.” Martin promised a streamlined show would have three days of content smashed into two—and the format worked. Slots were a half hour each; most were face-paced interviews by Debbie and company, with a few conventional yet exceptional show-and-tell presentations sprinkled throughout. The engine ran as smoothly as a fully-charged Tesla.
This is not, however, a review of the conference but an overview of the experience. And overall, what I learned was that with some strategic tweaks to an otherwise familiar format, the high energy made for a quality UX. The sold-out in-person audience of over 1,000 attendees and an as yet unknown number of remote streamers were given a lot to enjoy, discuss, debate and ponder. For the time I was on site, I didn’t see, as I did at many of other such events, the audience loitering in the hallways during the main sessions. Instead the pervasive optimism radiating from the stage was what Neville Brody called “embracing”. The attendees wanted to hear about and partake in the present and future of design.
So what did I learn? I learned that teams have replaced lone geniuses, but geniuses still lead many of these teams (they just do it without the same hype and fanfare). I also learned that my prejudices about graphic design being a service profession (period-exclamation-point) were wrong. The audience members I spoke to did not want to simply do their client’s bidding, they had their own creative points of view and were excited to show their stuff. I learned from Neville Brody’s presentation that to teach the new design, a teacher must not impart their own knowledge but rather listen, digest and help direct the students’ own knowledge. I learned that the field, in whatever form it takes in the near and distant futures, is not about the regurgitating old myths and legends but instilling a new sense of “design feeling,” by experiencing greater empathy by makers and for users.
Finally, but most importantly, I learned that malaise as a byproduct of frustration is a waste. I learned that AIGA, or whatever new, better name it will be called today, tomorrow and years from now, still needs to be the national design hub — a resource where all designers will enjoy what Kinon called a “safe space” where new ideas varied disciplines and diverse languages are continually regenerated, nurtured and repopulated with newcomers of all design disciplines.