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Lynda Weinman: Hello! I'm Lynda Weinman, co-founder of lynda.com, an educational Web
site that offers computer skills and design training.
I've also been a teacher at Art Center College of Design, and I've authored many
books on Web design and graphics. Last year, in 2009, I was elected to the National
Board of AIGA, and while it was a great honor, I realized that there was a
lot I didn't know about the organization, from its history, its role as
a national association, and the benefits that it provides to members and the
design industry as a whole. I was traveling to New York to attend the
annual AIGA board meeting and its Design Legends gala, and decided I would use
this opportunity to learn more about the organization and to document and
share my experiences. I started at AIGA's National Design Center
on Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan, where I met with Ric Grefe, the executive director
of AIGA, to ask about the organization's history and structure.
Well, tell us about AIGA and how it was formed originally, and maybe a little bit
about its structure. It's mostly a volunteer organization.
Ric Grefe: Absolutely, and it's a fascinating story how it started.
In 1914, Woodrow Wilson received a letter from the German government, asking if
he would send books to the Leipzig Book Fair. He asked his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert
Hoover, to do something about it. Herbert Hoover wrote to the National Arts
Club, which is just a couple of blocks from here at Gramercy Park, and said, "What
are these graphic arts?" And so 14 people got together to talk about
how they would put together a U.S. entry for the book show in Leipzig, and became
the founding members of AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
Lynda: So AIGA no longer is an acronym for something, correct?
Ric: No it isn't. I mean, it was the American Institute of Graphic Arts, but in fact, as
the profession has morphed, so has the organization.
So now we're the Professional Association for Design, which is much more inclusive.
Lynda: That's an exciting direction. Can you talk a little bit about how Design
is changing and how AIGA is changing along with?
Ric: When you think of it, AIGA was founded in 1914,
so it's almost a hundred years ago. And then it was people who were in the graphic
arts. The graphic arts then were typographers and
the publishers and lithographers, photographers. And as communication design
has changed over the years to include editorial design, corporate identity, interaction
design, film and television, clearly AIGA had to move along with it.
So the core, the DNA of AIGA is really about communication design,
the purposeful use of words and images to communicate messages, but in fact,
media had become less important in that, so it's not so much graphic design as
it's around its core communication design. And then, in the last decade or so, we've
added a whole new dimension to design, which is design thinking, the idea that designers
see problems differently and can be applied to many different problems.
So AIGA is moving along with profession, as it has over the decades.
Lynda: And so how many members today, and how is the organization structured?
Ric: It's 22,000 members today. The chapters are interesting because everyone
becomes a member of AIGA with the national organization, and then where there
are enough members to create a local organization, we encourage them to do so.
So we now have 64 chapters, and we are on 200 college campuses with student groups.
Lynda: So I am a little bit interested in the governance, in the structure of
the organization. It's clearly a non-profit, and there is - you're
part of a small, paid staff. Is that correct? Ric: That's right. So there is a small staff
of 15 to 20 people here in New York, but the heart of
a professional association is really the members, and I think that as a
philosophy, we don't believe that there should be a large central staff
because frequently what happens in an organization like that is that the staff
begins to think they are the profession and acting like it.
And we believe really strongly that the passion, the heart, the soul is in
the members themselves. And so what the paid staff can do is enable
them to achieve their own aspirations and successes.
And that's what we do. In a highly-leveraged way,
we encourage the volunteers, as either chapters or as taskforces, to take on the
things that are important to them. And we try to see that they not only get achieved,
but also that we can then take them and give them greater voice.
Lynda: And to become active in AIGA, what do you think the benefits are for those local
groups that are self-forming, in a way? Ric: Well, for any of the members, over the
15 years I've been here, whenever we survey them, they always give us four answers
on why they joined. One is that they want a sense of community
because designers tend to work alone. So there is a sense of community they gain
out of being part of a large organization.
A second reason is that they want to share information, and they want to
discover what's going on around them. Again, because they don't necessarily work
in large groups of designers, they may in studios, but then they even wonder
what's going on beyond the walls of the studio. The third reason is that they want people
to understand what they do, and the fourth reason is they want respect for it.
So with these chapters, why do they join a chapter?
They join a chapter for probably two reasons. One, they want us to give voice to their ambitions,
with a louder voice. And we can do it collectively with 22,000
voices. The second reason, though, is they do want
that opportunity for networking, to come together and to share, not only the experience
they have, but also share information.