Ric Grefé has been the Executive Director of the AIGA for the past 20 years—an organization that boasts a membership of over 25,000 and has had an enormous influence on the practice of design. After its centennial year—AIGA itself has been around for 100 years—Ric will step down as the organization's director, and in this interview, talks about the state of design, his experience with the organization, his legacy, and his next professional steps.
[Coroflot is proud to be a decade-long partner of the AIGA, and Allan Chochinov served on its national board for the past three years.]
Ric Grefé: The mid-1990s were an interesting moment for design. Although it was a full decade after the introduction of the Mac, the profession (and the educational community) were still wrestling with what role technology tools might play. It was not clear whether user interface design was a designer's realm or a developer's realm; motion design was not pervasive; we were not yet talking about experience design, design strategy or design thinking. The challenges for the profession were communicating the value of design, educating mothers about what their designer children were doing, and seeking meaningful roles for designers...as well as balancing craft and technology.
The mandate for a national design organization was in flux: an exclusive club of accomplished graphic designers or an inclusive hub of a vital creative community? Was AIGA adapting quickly enough to serve the profession as it was evolving? Was it to serve existing members or lead the next generation of members?
The situation was exacerbated, of course (always is in new jobs), because the financial condition of AIGA was tenuous. So the first steps were to re-evaluate all operations; begin thinking about new revenue streams; and launching the listening campaign to discover what members were saying across the land.
I spent 180 nights on the road the first year, visiting chapters and influential members, and also had the advantage of bringing in a great facilitator to work with our chapter leaders on imagining the future at a retreat that occurred 6 weeks after I arrived. That resulted in the first drafts of a new strategic plan. We started moving very quickly trying to move away from the impression that we were a club led by cliques; we immediately began to try to implement some of the suggestions from the retreat.
Yes. I was responsible for strategic planning and legislative advocacy for public television and radio in Washington, which was a great prelude to AIGA...working with creative professionals determined to reach people with meaningful content, yet challenged by media and technology. Yet one of the best preparations of that experience was learning how to work with and deeply respect local affiliates—whether television and radio stations or chapters.
From my early teens on, I was a bit of a design geek. And at Dartmouth, I became enthralled with letterpress printing, studying with Ray Nash (an early AIGA medalist). The day after I graduated, I was on my feet all day at the Stinehour Press setting type by hand for a book for the Morgan Library. Yet my careers took me into a number of other arenas before coming across a print ad in the New York Times classified section one Sunday for an executive director at AIGA.
Here are a few. AIGA was suffering from a (misplaced) impression among chapters and many members that it was led by an elitist clique in New York that was not well connected to the rest of the country. AIGA at that moment was running more like a club and not necessarily stretching the boundaries of progressive association management (the membership records were 3x5 cards in shoe boxes, at least one Mac had not been taken out of its box, the office network involved placing a floppy disk with your content on the partition between cubbies for the next worker to use, and every employee was entitled to select their own font and style for correspondence). Finances were challenged, yet the production values of national events were not appealing enough to draw sponsors in ways that properly recognized the value of access to our community.
This was precisely the moment when AIGA should (and would) shift from a club to a hub...of an entire networked community. Or, in the metaphor of the moment, to move from the cathedral to the bazaar.
AIGA was also deeply anchored in "graphic design" even as the design disciplines were being called into play crossing the traditional boundaries seamlessly in service to client needs, but also "communication design" was expanding into interaction design, user experience, branding and ultimately experience design.
Members felt they needed help in understanding how they could create greater value for clients, even as they also felt that AIGA needed to help them communicate the value of design more broadly to the public, business, government and the media.
There were few student members and no organized student groups. Educators had abandoned AIGA to create their own association.
These, and other observations, were a perfect environment to help transform an esteemed eighty year old organization into an influential voice and supportive institution for creative professionals who were changing business, technology, media and culture.
I think designers are ahead of the curve in being closely associated with both innovation and the customer experience specifically in any social media or technology interaction applications, since the designed interface is virtually the whole experience. This is the vamped start-up scene. In other areas of product, communication, experience, service and organizational design, the appreciation for design's central role is growing more slowly when looking across the board but is demonstrated dramatically in some highly visible cases.
And you ask about AIGA's role in all this.
AIGA is a shared voice always promoting the value of design and its potential to create value for business, society and each person's experience. In this role, we create greater understanding, respect and opportunity for all designers.
Some designers do not need the help. They have found ways to demonstrate the full range of their capability with clients—as a result of vision, thoughtful communication or the sheer virtuosity of their work. However many designers make their case by reinforcing simply what they, personally, can do for clients. AIGA, on the other hand, takes a position that all designers have a role to play in stages product or service development and strategy and certainly in crafting the ultimate experience.
This was precisely the moment when AIGA should (and would) shift from a club to a hub...of an entire networked community. Or, in the metaphor of the moment, to move from the cathedral to the bazaar.
AIGA has been an early voice for the profession in areas such as brand experience, experience design, service design, design for social change, design to improve the civic experience, providing design as a substantive element of the discussion of business, political, global and social issues. In each of these cases, AIGA has played a role in opening the door to credibility for designers in realms that extend beyond popular preconceptions…and all aimed at enhancing the influence of designers and their value. This is accomplished through our role in forums where business leaders and independent sector leaders gather, creating broad demand for designers in new roles.
For designers who feel their voice and experience alone can change the world, there may be little need for a community of designers to pursue their aspirations together. For those who welcome the volume of a shared voice, the means of growing through shared experiences, and a structure for exploring opportunities for the future of the profession, AIGA plays a critical role.
The transition from The American Institute of Graphic Arts, with its deep legacy in graphic design, to AIGA, the professional association for design, was easy and hard, leading and following, forward looking yet sad for some.
By the time the issue came up, many of our most successful designers were confidently addressing challenges for clients that went beyond the traditional sense of graphic design, even though most of our members had emerged from a graphic design education. Communication design, at a minimum, began to encompass more aspects of the profession, as designers took responsibility for form and content in their work. The most influential designers were working in a space that was more conceptual, more multi-disciplinary and more strategic than the making of two-dimensional artifacts. Outspoken members were urging that AIGA begin to move toward a model of design that was problem solving rather than creative making.
And then the profession began working much more frequently in the digital realm; interaction design, user experience, experience design and brand experience became part of what some saw as the progressive expansion of the domain. And these new fields of practice drew from digitally literate communication designers as well as from developers.
"Many designers make their case by reinforcing simply what they, personally, can do for clients. AIGA, on the other hand, takes a position that all designers have a role to play in stages product or service development and strategy and certainly in crafting the ultimate experience."
So AIGA contemplated the change at a moment when it was clear that future opportunities for designers would extend well beyond graphic design. At the same time, many of our members had already made that shift. We were both leading and following our members in this transformation.
Easy and forward looking, because it seemed self evident if you were to lead the profession to a more influential future, as professional associations should; hard and sad, because few designers who loved the craft wanted us to seem to be diminishing our attention on the craft and passion that had drawn them to the profession.
The challenge for AIGA became one of being credible as an organization that supported the inspirations and aspirations of disciplines that had once considered themselves discrete or that had only recently defined themselves, with the usual brash self-confidence that they are different from everyone else.
Yet today, by focusing clearly on the potential for designers to use their creative talents to make a difference in the world, regardless of the confines of their education, AIGA attracts communication designers, type designers, industrial and product designers, design strategists, service and organizational designers, educators and design managers, and those interested in designing for social change. AIGA's activities—conferences, editorial content, professional development opportunities, and chapter events—reflect this breadth of interests.
We try to balance an exploration of design in all its forms with programming that helps to refine designers' appreciation of complexity and context, aspects of problem solving that are missing in the traditional design education and yet are relevant to every form of design.
Our content and our advocacy are strongly ecumenical, covering the breadth of design and the full potential for the creative mind to create value. Our membership is broadly based in all dimensions. Yet we continue to strive to deepen our program offerings in ways that reassure members who did not emerge from communication design that we represent the community that will help them to succeed.
I have discovered three truths about my own interests during my careers and I am ready to act on them.
First, my manna is ideas…thoughtfully expressed or discovered ideas from divergent and distant perspectives. I read essays voraciously from the humanities, social sciences, political sciences, philosophy and the arts.
Second, I will always want to find ways to apply the power of designing in its integration of empathy, creativity and commitment to flawless execution toward solving problems that affect the human experience. This is a special gift of my experience working with all of you over the years.
And third, I love to watch people of all ages learn…and I believe learning is so critical today, both for reasons of technological change and simply to improve civic discourse. The "missing semester" incidentally is not technological; it is in the subjects that influence human relationships and understanding.
With that said, once I have made my way through the stack of books next to my bed, I will turn to finding a next career that builds on these interests and hope to find a purposeful use for them.
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