AIGA Design Podcasts

“If you want to be a truly effective designer, you need to make sure that whatever it is that you’re designing is also designed to reside within a broader and more complex organization…and is not just solving for the problem that you are analyzing, which is what designers are excellent at.” - Rodrigo Canales

Rodrigo Canales, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management, and Michael Bierut, Partner at Pentagram discuss the challenges that designers face as we advance as leaders in our careers and how the Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders program equips design leaders to address those challenges.

"Thinking of design as problem-solving is an improvement over thinking of design as art, but as we move into a world of systems, the idea of solving a problem may be replaced by the idea of finding balance in a system..."

This clip from Hugh Dubberly is from a never-before-released interview conducted in 2019 at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Hugh will be teaching a workshop on Generative AI for Designers with Shelley Evenson, managing director of Song at the AIGA Executive Leadership Summit (Alexandria, VA, March 12-14, 2023).

While we are still on break from producing new content, we will continue cross-posting podcast episodes from the design community, and other audio content.

Last month at the AIGA Design Conference, Lee-Sean Huang, AIGA's Director of Design Content and Learning and the producer of our podcasts, had the chance to hang out with Sean Schumacher and record an episode called “The Surreal World” for Sean's podcast which is called “Did I Do That?”

“Did I Do That?” is a conversation-style podcast about doing design, making mistakes, and the fun we have along the way.

AIGA has just wrapped our season of Design Adjacent. In the meantime, we will be posting some bonus materials to our feed while we figure out the future format of our shows. Our first feed swap is with The Futures Archive. 

Shauna Carey currently serves as Chief Executive Officer, leveraging her deep expertise in both design and social impact to oversee the strategy and vision for IDEO.org. Previously, in her role as Executive Design Director & Chief Communications Officer, Shauna worked alongside design teams and communities to surface insights to unlock new possibilities, create narratives that inspire action, and share stories about the impact of design. Over the past nine years at IDEO.org, Shauna has worked on projects and programs focused on advancing health equity, criminal justice reform, refugee rights, gender equality, and climate resilience. She also previously served as Managing Director and co-lead of our New York studio.

Prior to joining IDEO.org, Shauna worked to expand access to quality education and health care at organizations like Room to Read and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. She also helped launch and grow a number of mission-driven startups in Europe and the San Francisco Bay Area. A social scientist at heart, Shauna holds a bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Outside of work, she’s happiest barefoot on a beach somewhere or at home in Brooklyn, where she can usually be found wandering around with a strong cup of coffee in hand.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Zachary Kaiser is Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Experience Architecture at Michigan State University, USA. His research and creative practice examine the politics of technology and the role of design in shaping the parameters of individual, social, and political possibility. His work has been featured in national and international exhibitions, and his writing, on topics ranging from the future of the arts in higher education to dream-reading technologies, appears in both scholarly and popular publications.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

For more than 25 years, Camille Finan has been building kitchens and helping women create something beautiful. She started her journey in a rather unexpected way though. She was a business development consultant and taught marketing to graduate students in California, and while she loved helping people start and grow small businesses, she didn’t feel she had the chance to be very creative with her hands. She shut down her business and went back to the basics. She dug ditches and hung drywall in the beginning but slowly over time, she realized she really loved carpentry and joined the carpenters union. That led her down a path of exploring different kinds of carpentry, eventually falling in love with kitchens.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Paul Taylor is the Chief Creative Officer and Founding Partner at global branding agency BrandOpus. Founded in 2007, BrandOpus creates meaningful and connected brand experience for some of the world's most revered brands. Fusing wisdom with wonderment, his role today is to lead all creative output across the London, New York, Chicago and Melbourne studios. Paul has served brand experience for a wide portfolio of brands including Nestlé, Kraft Heinz, McCain, Britvic and First Direct. His work has been recognized by the likes of D&AD, The Design Business Association, Pentawards and The Drum.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

On this episode of AIGA Design Adjacent…Moving from hobby to work, taking advantage of the experts in your corner, value of a business coach, investing in yourself, making data work for you, and being helpful with Chris Hervochon, Better Way CPA, Virtual CFO for marketing and creative agencies and nonprofit organizations

Archie is a nationally known art director, designer, author, business owner, and educator. He was chair of the Graphic Design Program at California State University Long Beach for 12 terms and was named Outstanding Professor of the Year in 2004. He has also operated his design-consulting firm, Archie Boston Graphic Design, since 1972. He was the first African American recipient of the prestigious AIGA Fellows Award from the Los Angeles Chapter of AIGA in 2007. The Fellows Award recognizes individuals who have made a significant contribution to raise the standards of excellence in practice and conduct within their local or regional design community. In 2021, he was the recipient of the AIGA Medal for expanding voice—he was recognized for his longstanding commitment to his students as an educator, mentor, and profound influence on the community of Los Angeles, as well as his bold, funny, polemical designs from a lifetime body of work.

Archie and his brother, David, are the creative force that created the 2016 documentary, Black Pioneers of the Sunshine City, which has been shown on WEDU in the Central Florida area during Black History Month, since 2017. He was also interviewed and his posters were featured in the documentary, The Real Mad Men of Advertising of the 1960’s, which was donated to The Smithsonian Museum in 2018.

As one of the few African-American graphic designers in California, he impacted generations of designers as an educator, writer, and designer.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Llisa Demetrios, the youngest granddaughter of Ray and Charles Eames, is a third generation maker, following in the footsteps of her creative legacy. Llisa is leading the Eames Institute as Chief Curator, and has previous experience as an Archivist at the MoMA, Eames Official, and has dedicated her life to keeping the Eames name present throughout design endeavors. Additionally, Llisa is on the Board of Directors for the Petaluma Arts Center, and is a passionate bronze sculptor.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Elise Schuster is a sexuality educator with 15 years of experience in youth development and pleasure-based sex education. Elise has a masters in public health from Columbia University with a specialization in sexuality and health. Elise began their work in public health at Physicians for Reproductive Health, training doctors to provide adolescent-friendly reproductive health care. They also spent many years teaching workshops at Babeland and having thousands of one-on-one educational pleasure-based sexual health conversations.

After their MPH, Elise spent almost a decade at a premiere NYC youth development center serving over 11,000 marginalized young people every year. Elise had several roles here including running intake and assessment for over 30 new young people every day, overseeing capacity building work, managing 30 student volunteers, starting a professional training institute, and a youth council, and overseeing a $6.5 million wraparound services grant with twelve subgrantee partners.

Elise also serves as a trainer on LGBTQ+ competency issues and regularly facilitates workshops for healthcare professionals, educators, artists, corporations, and more.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Margot Bloomstein is one of the most prominent voices in the content strategy industry. She is the  author of Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap and Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project and the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston. As a speaker and strategic adviser, she has worked with marketing teams in a range of organizations over the past two decades. The creator of BrandSort, she developed the popular message architecture-driven approach to content strategy. Margot teaches in the content strategy graduate program at FH Joanneum University in Graz,  Austria, and lectures around the world about brand-driven content strategy and designing for trust.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Meg Mothershed is the strategy guru and resident wordsmith for Mothershed Design Co., a boutique branding and web design studio based near Denver, Colorado. Having wanted to own her own business since she was six years old, joining her partner, Josiah, was a no-brainer. Meg combines her passion for entrepreneurship with a love of problem-solving to help small businesses. Meg manages all the nitty-gritty details of the business, as well as handles the copywriting for brands and websites.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Diana Barnes (DB)  is the Chief Brand Officer and Creative Director at Munchkin. Under her leadership, Munchkin’s Brand Design team has won over 80 top international design awards for 360 designs, the highly coveted Red Dot Award among the latest. A passionate advocate for trees, animals, and the environment, she created and leads all Munchkin CSR initiatives such as partnerships with The Whale Sanctuary Project, Trees for the Future and IFAW (The International Fund for Animal Welfare) and Radiant Colors. Before joining Munchkin, she served as the Global Director of Brand Design for Dell, Inc. In this key role, she led global teams in Austin, India, and Asia. Prior to this, her career actually began in music and entertainment, holding executive creative positions at Sony and EMI, as well as several global ad agencies.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Dave Garrett, Chief Strategy & Growth Officer, drives PMI’s growth strategy by working across the organization to define, test, and deliver solutions that enable individuals and organizations to create impact and propel change. Dave was the co-founder, President and CEO of ProjectManagement.com (formerly Gantthead.com), an online community for project professionals, established in 2000 and acquired by PMI in 2014. Since joining PMI, he has held several leadership roles, including dual role as Director of Digital Presence and CEO of ProjectManagement.com. Dave’s passion for project management led him to serve in multiple volunteer positions for PMI prior to becoming employed by the organization. Earlier in Dave’s career, he also created Project Pain Reliever, a just-in-time handbook for managing projects and has published and bylined dozens of articles related to project management, technology trends, and more.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Ritesh Gupta is the founder of Useful School, the world’s first pay-what-you-can online design school for people of color. He specializes in product design, product management, branding, typography, and growth analytics. Ritesh has collaborated or worked for companies including Wieden+Kennedy, Mother Design, 2 Shark Tank companies, Sagmeister & Walsh, R/GA and Cooper Hewitt. His work has been featured in Adweek, AIGA Eye on Design, It’s Nice That, Wallpaper, Print Mag, Brand New, The Dieline, and more. He is also a volunteer for Where Are The Black Designers?.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Lisa Sasaki is currently the interim director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. The new museum was established by Congress in late 2020 as part of the Smithsonian. Lisa was appointed interim director in March 2021and before joining the Smithsonian, she was the director of the Audience and Civic Engagement Center at the Oakland Museum of California. Lisa was the director of program development at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles from 2003 until 2012, where she directed major institutional projects. During her tenure at JANM, she supervised the museum’s curatorial, public programs, web, education and collections departments and managed and led the strategic planning for programs, exhibitions, audience development and fundraising.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Join AIGA's Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with design industry leaders and innovators. These conversations seek to inspire dynamic new conversations in and outside of the design community. This episode's guest is Lynda Decker, Creative Director at Decker Design.

In 2001, Catherine and Paul joined forces to create an original agency concept, built around the idea that true collaborative thinking and different perspectives can solve brand challenges holistically—and better. Together, with their talented team of brand architects, they partner with some of the world’s most forward-looking brands. Their strategic and creative guidance has helped brands better our world by tackling the important topics such as sustainability, health and wellness, and empowerment head on.

Catherine sets the vision for the business and shapes the strategic direction for the work. Growing up in Paris as a child of parents who worked for the United Nations, she was brought up in an international community, steeped in colorful stories, beliefs, and values. That ultimately fueled her passion for entrepreneurship and the potential she sees in people and businesses to make our world better.

Paul is the creative force behind the business. He grew up in Liverpool, UK, a hotbed of creativity with many musicians, writers and artists. His surroundings shaped his perspective and created a deep-seated curiosity to create, make and explore the potential in things. His guidance inspires new ideas and unlocks new ways of thinking.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Join AIGA's Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with design industry leaders and innovators. These conversations seek to inspire dynamic new conversations in and outside of the design community. This episode's guest is Michael Bierut, Pentagram partner and AIGA Medalist.

Join AIGA's Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with design industry leaders and innovators. These conversations seek to inspire dynamic new conversations in and outside of the design community. The guest in this episode is Katrina Alcorn, General Manager, Design at IBM. This Fireside Chat was recorded and streamed live at the 2022 AIGA Design + Business Conference. 

Bret is an industrial designer, entrepreneur, and investor. He is the founder and director of the award-winning design studio, Box Clever, which is renowned for creating physical products and experiences that delight consumers and build category-leading brands. The studio is responsible for designing best-selling products including Away luggage, Caraway cookware, and July air conditioners.

The San Francisco-based design practice operates at the intersection of industrial design, brand strategy, and investment. Bret’s expertise lies in balancing creative vision with real-world experience and engineering prowess. He understands the nuances of taking an idea from concept to market. Specializing in consumer products, and with focus on the creation of

physical experiences that enhance human relationships, Box Clever operates under the belief

that anything can be successfully designed.

He is committed to executing a challenge to its most brilliant realization. To do this, he balances creative vision with real-world experience of industrial design, brand strategy, and business ventures.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Minal is an author, speaker, and strategic consultant with more than 20 years of professional experience. Her areas of expertise include human-centered design, behavior change science, and the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion as they relate to media, marketing and communications, and organization design.

As the Founder and Principal Consultant of Brevity & Wit, Minal is passionate about designing for equity. Her work includes working with NPR’s news managers to design a system for diversifying news sources. She is also the creator and facilitator for the DEI Executive Forum, a six-month cohort learning experience for general managers in public media that helps them become more equitable leaders and develop a strategic plan to accomplish their DEI goals.

Minal’s previous work includes being an educational content specialist for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street and its international co-productions, and a press intern for Doctors Without Borders. She is a sought-after keynote speaker, and her thought leadership has been published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and TheHill.com.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Steven is graphic designer, art director, design critic and author. He has held the position of senior art director at New York Times Book Review and is also a prolific writer, having authored and co-authored over 200 books about the history and practice of typography, illustration, graphic design, popular culture and propaganda. He also worked as an editor for the prestigious AIGA Journal of Graphic Design.

He is the co-founder and co-chair (with Lita Talarico) of the MFA Designer as entrepreneur program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he lectures on the history of graphic design and teaches a writing class in SVA Design Writing, Research and Criticism. He also was co-director for ten years of SVA’s Modernism & Eclecticism: A History of American Graphic Design symposiums.

With Seymour Chwast, he co-founded Push Pin Editions, a packager of visual books, including the forthcoming "Hell: The People & Places" illustrated by Chwast; and with his wife Louise Fili he has produced over twenty books and design products for Chronicle Books, PA Press and other publishers.

Steven is the recipient of the Smithsonian Institution National Design Award for "Design Mind," the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, among other honors. And in 2017, the annual Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary was created to spotlight individuals who best exemplify the tradition of prolific writing and boundless curiosity.

In Fall 2022 his book, "Growing Up Underground: A Memoir Of Counterculture New York" will be published by PA Press.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

About Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, the Open Source software used by over 40% of the web, including this site. WordPress is a part of who Matt is; he can’t not work on WordPress. The company celebrated 15 years in 2018. The project touches a lot of people, something he’s recently begun to appreciate and he considers himself very lucky to be able to work on something he loves so much.

In late 2005, Matt left WordPress to found a company called Automattic, which is now the force behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Simplenote, Longreads, The Atavist, and many other products. The company’s mission—make the web a better place.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Join us for a new episode of Design Adjacent were we talk sustainability, evolving behaviors, future considerations, and designing recycling. What is the future of sustainable design and how do we implement realistic change? As Head of Sustainability at Pearlfisher, Brandi Parker, challenges designers to find answers to those questions.

About Brandi Parker

Brandi Parker is Head of Sustainability at Pearlfisher. Sustainability is fundamental to how Pearlfisher operates and creates, and is the foundation of the work of all of their teams. In her role, Brandi challenges Pearlfisher's designers to think about the end game at the start, and encourages their clients not to problem-solve based on ease, but on brand experience and environmental impact. She is revered by both for offering innovation and problem-solving, grounded in practicality, which comes from her many years of experience and expertise in technical realization.

She firmly believes that the future of sustainable design does not just come down to materials – and managing waste – but implementing realistic and incremental change through a multi-disciplinary approach. By understanding changing culture, continuing to innovate with cutting-edge materials and processes, and joining this with the power of design, Brandi believes we can help change people’s behavior and encourage more sustainable actions and choices. This is where tangible, positive and long-term change will come from.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

This episode is the audio version of Steven McCarthy's article in Dialectic (Volume III, Issue I): "Design Thinking? Thank an Engineer, read by Lee-Sean Huang. 

About Maurice Cherry

About Pek Ponpaet

Pek is the founder of Impekable, a digital product studio that helps enterprise and B2B SaaS companies create better products through user experience design. Impekable has designed and created products for X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, Adobe, Twilio, Pentair, two startups acquired by Palo Alto Networks. Impekable has been recognized as one of America’s fastest growing businesses on the Inc. 5000 list 3 times in a row.

Prior to Impekable, Pek designed and developed next generation user interfaces at Accenture Technology Labs’ HCI group, and created interactive experiences for clients including Tesla and USAF at digital agency Roundarch Isobar.

Pek loves helping startups and is a product mentor at accelerators and incubators including TechStars, 1871, and Bosch’s Chicago Connectory.

He also has a design podcast called What is UX where he interviews design leaders from companies such as Tesla, Netflix and Youtube on the topic of user experience design.

He helps enterprises and startups achieve their goals through product strategy, world class user experience design, software engineering and app development. He is also a mentor, helping others by sharing his story and offering advice to those in startups and product development.

“Mentorship” is one one of those warm fuzzy words. We know we want it. We know it’s a good thing. But what exactly does mentorship mean, and how do we make it work for our own unique needs? How can we be more effective mentors and mentees? 

We explore these questions in this special edition of the AIGA Design Podcast, where we revisit the voices of experts who have spoken to our community over the last few years. We also do a deep dive into AIGA NY’s Mentorship Program to understand what it takes to structure and sustain meaningful professional relationships.

Cheryl Heller is a leader, designer, scholar, business strategist and an author. Her experience spans corporate, philanthropic, nonprofit, and academic worlds, and in each role and organization, she has created and grown groundbreaking programs. She founded two companies and created successful new programs at the School of Visual Arts in New York and Arizona State University. She has taught creativity to leaders around the world, helped grow clients’ businesses from small regional enterprises to multi-billion global market leaders, launched category-redefining divisions and products, reinvigorated cultures, and designed strategies for hundreds of successful entrepreneurs.

About Cheryl Heller

Cheryl Heller is a leader, designer, scholar, business strategist and an author. Her experience spans corporate, philanthropic, nonprofit, and academic worlds, and in each role and organization, she has created and grown groundbreaking programs. She founded two companies and created successful new programs at the School of Visual Arts in New York and Arizona State University.  She has taught creativity to leaders around the world, including the USA, UK, Kenya, Mexico, Ghana, Sierra  Leone, India, China and South Korea. She has helped grow clients’ businesses from small regional enterprises to multi-billion global market leaders, launched category-redefining divisions and products, reinvigorated cultures, and designed strategies for hundreds of successful entrepreneurs.

Cheryl’s most recent position was ASU’s Director of Design Integration and Professor of Practice in Innovation U, she launched the first transdisciplinary STEM MS program in innovation and venture development, relaunched and scaled a transdisciplinary undergrad program, and developed curriculum for an engineering design program.

Prior to joining ASU, Cheryl launched and chaired the first STEM master’s program in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has also led a multi-year project using design to support youth as they age out of foster care and she recently completed her doctoral research on the  performative role that language plays in our ability to design for social equity.

And, in 2014, Cheryl was awarded the AIGA Medal for her contribution to the field of design: “Recognized for deftly embodying the many dimensions of communication design and for inspiring and guiding people and organizations to use design for social innovation as a strategic tool to improve the human experience.”

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

About Gail Anderson

Gail Anderson is an NYC-based designer, educator, and writer. She is Chair of BFA Design and BFA Advertising at the School of Visual Arts and the creative director at Visual Arts Press. She has served as senior art director at Rolling Stone, creative director of design at SpotCo, and as a designer at The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and Vintage Books. She has taught at SVA for 30 years and has co-authored 15 books on design, typography, and illustration with Steven Heller.

Anderson serves on the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee for the US Postal Service and the advisory boards of Poster House and The One Club for Creativity. She is an AIGA Medalist and the 2018 recipient of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Lifetime Achievement Award for Design. Her work is represented in the Library of Congress’s permanent collections, the Milton Glaser Design Archives, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

AIGA Executive Director Bennie F. Johnson talks with today's leaders in design, business, and technology, focused around the topics of leadership growth, the future of work, and creating a culture of design. Join us in welcoming Theresa Fitzgerald, Vice President of Creative at Sesame Workshop.

Theresa Fitzgerald is vice president creative at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street. She leads the in-house Brand Creative Services team dedicated to the mission of helping kids grow stronger, smarter and kinder.

Fitzgerald has spent more than 25 years developing creative to entertain, educate and engage young minds. Prior to Sesame, she oversaw design and branding vision at Nickelodeon, Snoopy & Peanuts, Scholastic and National Geographic.

She is an adjunct professor at New York University/Steinhart teaching design; an educational team member at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum supporting Design in the Classroom, and has been a guest speaker at New York University, School of Visual Arts, AIGA New York City, Parsons The New School, Cooper Hewitt Family Day, Rochester Institute of Technology and Brand New Conference.

Fitzgerald is committed to problem solving, mind-evolving and boiling it down to the essence of the big idea with humor and delight.

AIGA Executive Director Bennie F. Johnson talks with today's leaders in design, business, and technology, focused around the topics of leadership growth, the future of work, and creating a culture of design. Join us in welcoming Randy J. Hunt, Head of Design at Grab, where he leads a team of designers, writers, engineers, and researchers who create Southeast Asia’s Super App.

He has served as Head of Design at Artsy and VP of Design at Etsy. In 2014, Etsy was honored with the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Corporate & Institutional Achievement. Randy is the author of Product Design for the Web, which explores the evolving discipline of product design for today’s connected world. He is an active writer, lecturer, critic, and visiting designer at many colleges and universities. 

AIGA Executive Director Bennie F. Johnson talks with today's leaders in design, business, and technology, focused around the topics of leadership growth, the future of work, and creating a culture of design. Join us in welcoming Alex Center, Owner of CENTER, a branding and design studio in Brooklyn, NY. Prior to opening his own studio, Alex worked for over a decade for The Coca-Cola Company where he led the strategy and design vision for the billion dollar beverage brands vitaminwater, smartwater and POWERADE. Over the years, Alex has designed packaging that has been in hands across the globe, created breakthrough marketing campaigns and launched innovative new products.

In this previously live-streamed episode of Design Future Now , host Lee-Sean Huang has a conversation with Robert Smith about mentorship, coaching, running an agency, and more.

Robert Smith is a creative director, agency owner, author, creative coach, professor and founding member of RGD (Association of Registered Graphic Designers). After 30 years in the creative industry, Rob is as inspired, driven and energized as he was the day he started his career. Through Think-Smith, Rob’s helps other designers and design teams feel the same way with workshops, coaching and strategies.

On this episode of AIGA Design Adjacent…

Terry Irwin is a professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and the Director of its Transition Design Institute. From 2009 until 2019, she was the Head of the School of Design, where she led the faculty in a redesign of curricula at the undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels to place design for society and the environment at the heart of all programs. In this episode of the AIGA Design Adjacent, Bennie Johnson talks with Terry about wicked problems, shifting our mindsets, waking up the knowledge we already have, and tango.

About Terry Irwin

Terry Irwin is a Professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and the Director of its Transition Design Institute. From 2009 until 2019 she was the Head of the School of Design, where she led the faculty in a redesign of curricula at the undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels to place design for society and the environment at the heart of all programs.

In 2003 Terry briefly left the field of design and moved to Devon, England to undertake a master’s Degree in Holistic Science at Schumacher College/Plymouth University, with the goal of learning to design in a more sustainable and socially responsible way. After completing her master’s degree, Terry joined the faculty at Schumacher College and taught design to students from diverse backgrounds such as biology, ecology, physics, sociology and activism. In 2007 she moved to Scotland to undertake doctoral studies at the Centre for the Study of Natural Design at the University of Dundee.

Since completing those studies, Terry’s efforts have been directed toward seeding and  catalyzing positive, systems-level change within design education and practice. Her recent  work has focused on making the tools and approaches used by designers available to  transdisciplinary teams working to address complex, systems problems. In 2015, along with co-creators Gideon Kossoff and Cameron Tonkinwise, Terry launched Transition  Design, a new area of design focus aimed at addressing wicked problems and catalyzing societal transitions toward more sustainable, equitable and desirable long-term futures.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

In this special edition of Design Future Now, host Lee-Sean Huang has a conversation with Studio HMVD partners Heather-Mariah Dixon and Abigail Kerns about their branding and content production studio, creative appropriation, navigating permissions and licensing for creative content, and more.

Isaiah Steinfeld is a proven startup veteran and innovation leader with the unique ability to deeply empathize with the user/customer while creating a big product vision. In the entrepreneurial space, he focuses on innovation capability that helps identify, develop, and invest in new future-focused opportunities. In this episode of AIGA Design Adjacent, Bennie Johnson talks with Isaiah about entrepreneurship, mentorship, and the future of design.

About Isaiah Steinfeld

Isaiah Steinfeld has successfully built, launched, and scaled disruptive products and businesses (Lyft, Intuit Workforce) for over a decade. Steinfeld most recently participated in the On Deck Founder Fellowship program, researching and building in the early stages of his next startup.

Before On Deck, Steinfeld held a leadership role as a Digital Product Leader and Entrepreneur at Nike inside their Advanced Innovation division: Valiant Labs, where he led global exploration around emerging technologies like AI/ML, IoT, XR, and Blockchain and founded new business ventures/startups to help create the future of sport and commerce for Nike.

In addition to leading and growing companies, Isaiah publicly speaks and writes about innovation, design, and technology. He is also actively involved in the tech community serving as a mentor, advisor, and investor with various startups, funds, and early-stage accelerators (TechStars, Berkeley Blockchain, MIT Technology Review, and more) focused primarily on early and growth-stage companies in the software and emerging tech space.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Nicole Belyna, SHRM-SCP is a field services director at SHRM and possesses more than 15 years in human resources, specializing talent management and leadership. In this episode of The ReStart from AIGA, Nicole and host Lee-Sean Huang talk about HR lessons learned from the first year and a half of the pandemic and ways for people managers to adapt and lead their teams forward. 

AIGA Executive Director Bennie F. Johnson talks with today's leaders in design, business, and technology, focused around the topics of leadership growth, the future of work, and creating a culture of design. Join us in welcoming Judy Wert, Co-Founder, Wert&Co Executive Search. Judy has been working with the leadership of innovative companies for over 25 years. She has earned an international reputation as a pivotal force in executive search. A trusted authority in the world of design and business, Judy is also known for bringing an added dimension to her work—a humanistic approach—fostering deep relationships through empathy, intuition, and curiosity.

W. David Hubbard is Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Verizon. He leads Verizon’s marketing, intellectual property, and new media law and policy team. David also serves as general counsel for the philanthropic Verizon Foundation, dedicated to solving critical social issues in the areas of education, health care and energy management, particularly in underserved communities. In this episode of AIGA Design Adjacent, host Bennie Johnson talks with David about not only the creative field but his path and why creativity was instrumental in career and offers listeners an opportunity to hear how legal and marketing can work together.

About W. David Hubbard

W. David Hubbard serves as Vice President & Deputy General Counsel for Verizon Communications.  He is located in Basking Ridge, New Jersey and leads Verizon’s Consumer Marketing and Products and Growth and Revenue legal team which provides support for Verizon’s portfolio of Consumer businesses including Verizon Wireless, Verizon Telecom, Verizon Consumer Markets, and Visible, among others.   He and his team provide support to Verizon Consumer Group’s Chief Revenue Officer and are responsible for providing legal counsel and guidance for all consumer products, devices and services; business initiatives and national advertising and marketing campaigns targeting consumers in all media; marketing strategy; advertising litigation; regulatory and network compliance; promotions; sweepstakes; external communications; corporate responsibility and compliance with state and federal regulations as well as applicable consumer protection laws. In addition to the above, Mr. Hubbard previously led Verizon’s Intellectual Property and Digital media legal teams and served as the General Counsel for the Verizon Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Verizon which is dedicated to solving critical social issues in the areas of education, healthcare and energy management, particularly in underserved communities.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Dominic Grijalva is a designer who primarily works on marketing and advertising projects that call for eye-catching imagery. His passions also lie in branding and identity design, as well as digital media projects that range from large scale such as digitally projected sets for theatre and live events to gifs and animations. Although California bred, he is currently living in Washington Heights, Manhattan and serves as Product Manager for TeeRico by Lin-Manuel Miranda. In this episode of AIGA Design Adjacent, host Bennie Johnson talks with Dominic about finding creativity in a pandemic year, being a Hamilton fan, and Broadway.

About Dominic Grijalva

As a freelance designer with nine years of professional experience, Dominic Grijalva's talents cover a wide range of media including marketing and advertising campaigns that call for eye-catching imagery, stunning digitally projected sets for theater and live events, merchandise inspired by your favorite Broadway shows, and silly gifs that loop on your phone screen.

Dominic is proud to have been recognized by AIGA, Communication Arts, Giphy, the Adobe Design Achievement Awards, and 99u for his print design and digital artwork. His original projection visuals for Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, and other titles have been featured in multiple regional productions around the world including the Kennedy Center.

When not so busy chasing inspiration, Dom can be found in a theater catching a show, tending to his house plants, singing and writing new music, or walking his Shiba Inu, Nala.

Although California bred, Dominic lives in Washington Heights and serves as Product Manager for TeeRico by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Tracy Brower is a PhD sociologist who studies the sociology of work, future of work, workers, and the workplace. Tracy is a principal with Steelcase's applied research and consulting. She is also the author of the Secrets of Happiness at Work and Bring Work to Life by Bringing Life to Work. She's a contributor to forbes.com and fast company among other publications. 

Tracy and the ReStart host Lee-Sean Huang talked about hybrid work, happiness, and creativity.

The ReStart from AIGA is a new content series that helps the design community move forward from COVID by posing salient questions and providing practical strategies

AIGA Executive Director Bennie F. Johnson talks with today's leaders in design, business, and technology, focused around the topics of leadership growth, the future of work, and creating a culture of design. Join us in welcoming Robbie Tseng, Vice President, Growth Design at HBO Max.  

This is the audio version of a livestreamed conversation between Lee-Sean Huang and Megan Marini and Priyanka Jain, co-founders and principals of 3x3 Design.

In this special ReStart episode of Design Future Live, Alex Robins and Annie Larson, part-time design educators at The New School and union representatives from the ACT-UAW Local 7902, speak to host Lee-Sean Huang about the challenges and opportunities faced by part time design educators and the power of collective action.

The ReStart from AIGA is a new content series that helps the design community move forward from COVID by posing salient questions and providing practical strategies

The ReStart from AIGA is a new content series that helps the design community move forward from COVID by posing salient questions and providing practical strategies. We are kicking off the series here on the podcast, and will be publishing interviews and panel discussions and other expert content across AIGA’s channels over the next few weeks.

In this episode, host Lee-Sean Huang talks with Allan Chochinov about his research and experimentation dealing with the challenges of hybrid teaching, with some students in the room, and some students on Zoom..

Allan is an educator writer, speaker, and advocate for the power and capacity of design. He's the founding chair of the MFA in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

This episode is adapted from a livestreamed conversation between Lee-Sean Huang and Lefteris Heretakis on the challenges and opportunities in design education. 

Lefteris Heretakis is a designer and lecturer. Since 1996, Lefteris has worked as a visual communicator with a wide range of clients ranging from startups to multinationals.

He’s currently teaching design at IE University in Madrid Spain. His reflexive research is focused on the real-world challenges in education and the unprecedented shifts that have taken place over the past 20 years.

Lefteris is also the host of two podcasts: the Design Education Talks podcast by the New Art School and the Designer Talks Podcast by the Chartered Society of Designers.

And also since 2019, Lefteris has been organizing the Design Education Forum, a two-day international event that brings practitioners from all over the world to share their experiences teaching art and design.

Esther Mun co-founded Little Fury Design in 2006 with her partner Tina Gaudin. Little Fury is an independent design studio of artists that specializes in creative strategy, branding, packaging, and illustration. Esther is a graduate of the school of visual arts SVA in New York, where she earned a degree in graphic design. Before starting Little Fury Design, Esther worked at pentagram and at Duffy and partners.

Links to things referenced in the episode:

Amanda Makulec is a visual analytics advisor who uses visualization, storytelling, and design thinking to transform how teams and organizations use data.  She shared her expertise with Lee-Sean Huang about how to design, visualize, and interpret data related to the COVID-19 / Coronavirus pandemic.

Design educator, data rights advocate, and recovering entrepreneur David Carroll talks with Lee-Sean Huang about the challenges that digital platforms pose to privacy, democracy, and beyond. 

Paul Pangaro, Professor of Practice at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute talks with Lee-Sean Huang of AIGA about design for conversation and design as conversation. How might designing better conversations lead to richer, more ethical interactions between humans and artificial intelligence? 

We hear from an educator and a student who are researching, teaching, and practicing design in an age of data and disruption. Professor Deb Littlejohn demystifies the buzzword "Big Data" and explains why she has her students tell lies with data. MFA student, Randa Hadi opens up about her hopes and fears for the design profession and how she's facing the future head on.