George Aye, Pissed-Off Optimist and Co-Founder of Greater Good Studio

Interactive Transcript

Speaker A Hello and welcome to another episode of the AIGA Design Podcast. My name is Lee Sean Huang, co executive director of learning and programs here at aiga, the professional association for Design. This season we are exploring the theme of design and performance and all the different nuances and facets of what those words mean. And now for my co host.

Speaker B I'm Giulia Donatello, design competitions and event manager at aig.

Speaker A And our guest this episode is George A. He is the co founder and co executive director of Greater Good Studio based in Chicago. George, it's so great to have you here on the show.

Speaker C Thanks so much for having me. Leshawn and Julia, it's great to meet the, you know, get the chance to be able to work with you on this podcast. Thanks for inviting me.

Speaker A Totally. So let's just jump into things to get to know you a little bit more. Beyond your job title and your affiliation, you also describe yourself as a pissed off optimist. That's on your LinkedIn right now. Can you elaborate what that means, to be a pissed off optimist? So our listeners and our viewers, if you're watching this on YouTube, can understand a little bit more of your journey and how you got to your particular point of view on design.

Speaker C Sure, sure. Thanks so much for that question. This term, I swear Sarah, my co founder, coined it and I just recently been hearing from her that she thinks I did this, so I can't. Now, nobody seems to remember who first came up with this term, but I think the two of us would identify as that very early on. And the idea of wanting to be a balance, of recognizing how broken and sort of screwed up the world seems to be, and certainly since January, that feels to be even more heightened. But the idea that we might also want to maintain a level of optimism or hope that things can be better might seem as though they are incongruous or mutually exclusive. And I think the idea that actually we could be both at the same time and that we might need to be both might be a way to help navigate how crazy things feel right now. And actually it's more like a perpetual state of being because if we can't do both, you might overcome with too much anger or be overcome with too much naivety and maybe miss something. So we thought it was important that we kind of name this feeling of being a pissed off optimist for ourselves. And we've actually found that it's been quite a helpful way of identifying our clients. It's been a helpful way of identifying people we've hired at the studio. And then it turns out, I think after somewhat thinking about a little more, we started naming it a little more frequently everywhere. And we think there's a bunch of pissed off optimists all over the place.

Speaker A Yeah, that's great. For me, that motto, that tagline, pissed off optimus kind of reminds me philosophically of what it's like to be a designer in general. Because in on one hand, like the pissed off part is like being a constant malcontent or we're unhappy with the status quo. Right. It's like the world could be more beautiful, more just whatever. That's why we make new things or redesign existing things. And then the optimism part is like you have to believe that things can be better or else there's kind of no point in doing your work. Right. So like it's this kind of constant tension of like not being so naive, but also like not being angry all the time and finding that in between space is like, I think the drive for a lot of designers and other creative folks.

Speaker C Yeah, I think that that is very much tied to an attitude of design. And I do think that the creative act of making new things or stewing on something and then generating something in response is a self informed resistance and it's a form of not letting the status quo become the only reality we have. I think designers are uniquely suited to create whole new worlds when given the chance. And we wouldn't want to do that if we didn't think that there's something perhaps could be maybe improved upon or better or more just. And I think when I was early on in my career, I think I just wanted things to be cooler. I think it was really as basic as that. Like this is not as cool as it could be. And I think I've started to realize that perhaps the brokenness or the way things are right now might not just be because of a temporary moment in time, but rather because the systems have been set up that way. So that kind of awareness, I think is a very sobering realization. And I think it's part of my journey as a designer in working in the social sector.

Speaker A Totally. And you're kind of taking this on the road, right? You're doing a tour. We were talking about this before we started rolling, but you're currently on an Angry Hour for Pissed Off Optimus tour on multiple cities. So can you tell us more about that? What inspired you to create that? How has it been going so far?

Speaker C Yeah, I think it's an interesting chance right now where Sarah and the team. And I have been thinking about how to be more in person with so many other pissed off optimists that we might know or perhaps haven't yet met. And the idea of being able to do that in person with very little programming, very little sort of like formal structure, there's not really a runoff show. It is literally meat for drinks after work. And we realized that if we could name it and then have the idea that going there would let you meet with other people who are like minded, might take care of a big chunk of the programming and the facilitation, because perhaps when you go to those events, there's a lot more structure when people are misaligned. And I think being attitudinally aligned actually does a little heavy lifting. So being attitudinally aligned means that you could show up at a place for drinks and kind of go, oh my God, can you believe this just happened? Or have you seen this latest headline? Or this nuttiness doesn't seem real. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? And I think in some other spaces that might not always be true. So meeting up for drinks, being able to vent a little, but then also know that you're in community with other like minded people, we thought there might be value in that. So we have now done it in Chicago and we sold out 100 tickets. We did it in Brooklyn, we sold out 400 tickets there, or sorry, 60 tickets. And we had some really great assistance from Stacy who runs the AIG in New York chapter. And yeah, so we have Philadelphia and Austin on the books with Sarah going to be handling the Austin one and others are to be announced and hopefully we'll do a couple more.

Speaker A Wonderful. Yeah, that sounds like a great way to send a different kind of bat signal out there. So it's not necessarily just a sort of profession based or demographic based thing. It really is like as you were saying, attitudinal. So you're trying to get like minded people in a room together. Right. Especially after being apart during the pandemic or just feeling isolated because of what's going on in politics and world events and things like that. I wanted to jump back in time a little bit and then we'll come back back to asking you more questions about your work and your background and stuff like that. But this goes back to 2020, which is when we were all apart at home, isolated during the pandemic. And you wrote an article that you published on Medium that was addressed to AIGA leadership at the time, which Julia didn't work here yet. And I was here, but I was not in a leadership position. But you were basically calling out that the American in aiga, American Institute of Graphic Arts, not just at aiga, but in the United States in general, has been treated as synonymous with white American, European American, particularly though within professional design organizations and just the history of design and the history of design pedagogy, for sure. So looking back on this article, I know five years have passed, leadership has changed and all of that, and, and we're in another Trump presidency. But, you know, so yeah, looking back on this, you know, how do you think about this? Or thinking back on this article is really just an open ended way to set this up and have you riff on this since it's been five years.

Speaker C Yeah. Thanks so much, Lee, Sean, for bringing this question up. I think I was genuinely surprised when I got the invite to come speak on your podcast because I remember thinking like, wait, you know, I like, pissed off everybody at AIGA when I wrote that thing, right? Like, I just wanted to make sure that you knew that I knew that you knew that I wasn't getting mistaken for, like, somebody else.

Speaker A Yeah, the other one.

Speaker C The other one. And I think I remember thinking like, are you sure you want me on? Because I, you know, I don't do a lot of these necessarily, and I don't want to make anybody feel unnecessarily uncomfortable. And I just want to make sure that you felt like, okay, look, as long as I were to come on, that we could make a good faith effort of wanting to discuss this and not pretend that I hadn't written the piece. Certainly my eye at the National Ball at the time, I think was quite poignant because I was feeling a lot of pressure around that moment of almost being seen as some sort of race expert when I definitely am not. I think I certainly have my own relationship, my own racial identity that I'm still working through. But I was starting to notice that perhaps I was starting to become handy like some sort of, like, go to. But I also appreciate that in this more recent effort, there seemed to be a genuine effort on your part of wanting to have a discussion. And I also appreciate the fact that there were, you know, two POC presenting interviewers on the podcast that seemed to be running this. And I felt like, okay, well, maybe there's a shot that we could, we could talk about this and not, not skirt around too much. I also know that, you know, when I first wrote that piece that I was pretty sure I was going to end up damaging a number of relationships that I had built up over time at aiga. But I think what I was seeing is this pattern of being called to help soothe these predominantly white groups of people with my advice or my thoughts on race. And to a degree, I was thinking, oh, that must be. That's actually kind of nice. Like, I think I was. I was benefiting in a way that felt quite stroked by ego to think that, oh, I might. Maybe I had to have something to say. But then I started to notice that perhaps am I being used in some way? And is there a risk of being used as a potential wedge? This is something that's, I think, a little newer to me in recognizing that perhaps my own racial identity might have a longer story than just me right now. I mean, there's an aspect of me showing up as an Asian male with a British accent that I think I've certainly seen in America can be disarming, perhaps. But I noticed that more and more I've seen this with other groups I've been an advisor to, that my racial identity might play into a larger model minority myth that's been around for a long time. And that Asian Americans being used in a way that actually acts as a wedge towards anti blackness has not been something that I was really aware of. I think that's newer language for me. And I think maybe at the time when I first wrote that letter, I was sort of just having lots of feelings, but not a lot, necessarily a lot of scholarship around it. So I don't know necessarily kind of how things have changed, but I was appreciative of wanting to talk about it with the two of you, for sure. I think that there's still a lot of hesitancy across design leadership across multiple organizations. AIG is certainly not that unique in having that phenomena. But I also think that we can't progress until we have more of this conversation out loud. And it's my hope that perhaps in my understanding, my growing understanding of my racial identity, I could be more of a useful ally as opposed to, like a person you have on speed dial when you want to feel better. Like, I don't want to be someone's conscience. I actually want to be helpful. And I think being helpful, I think, is a core part of wanting to be a designer.

Speaker A Right. Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. I think I have some immediate responses and then love to hear if Julie has anything as a newer person, a newer staff member at aiga. But, yeah, I do remember your article coming in at the time. Like I said, I was not in a. In a leadership position per se. I was kind of publicly facing in terms of content, but not in terms of being in charge of our strategy at that level. And now I am. So it has been helpful to kind of reflect on that a bit and then also thinking about our current political moment where things like DEI are explicitly under attack from the highest levels of government. And just maybe like thinking about my own role at AIGA as like a curator essentially, who books guests for this podcast also helps select guest speakers at our conference coming up in LA this October. One of the principles has just been opening things up more. You know, we've been doing more open calls. We're starting something new this year where we have community based voting on some of the things we're doing for our conference, in addition to having AIG members who are experts in their domains in the industry and academia also form a committee, but just having more input because I feel like there has been a history of AIGA being criticized for being elitist in this way or not being transparent in this way. And then the second thing I'll say is that in addition to that, we've also found that that's not enough. We don't have like an official DEI policy or quotas or anything for our guests, but we just notice anecdotally that the folks who have agents or staff members who actively pitch us tend to skew mail and tend to skew white. Right. Which is just, it's also a result, I think, of just demographics of leadership in our industry. But in terms of like, yeah, it's like just if the number of people who apply or pitch to speak is already skewed in one way, I think that also kind of highlights the need for us to go out of our way and actively either invite people to pitch or just invite people to kind of compliment the views that we're already getting because they're not necessarily applying or pitching for these things. So, yeah, those are a couple of my immediate thoughts, just as a curator in my current position. I don't know if Julia has anything to add to that.

Speaker B Yeah, I know. I think first I want to thank George for the openness to come back and participate in this conversation. And I also want to acknowledge that every time I have read or I have seen George in conferences, I have always felt very inspired by your courage to speak up your mind. And I think this letter that I later on found out that you wrote also is very much in line with your, with everything that I know of you so far. Publicly. Right. So I think it's very much in line. So I admire how you're able to keep your principles and make sure that you speak up, even though that might be that might be there might be some negative impacts for your work or for social circles and so on. So I do think that also the angry hour for optimists are also a moment like this for us to talk about all this and learn with each other and vent in a safe space. So I appreciate also that a conversation like this is also being expanded to different locations and invited other folks to join. So, yeah, I think that's my point. I appreciate you coming and sharing your point of view and perspective of that time, but also of anything that has changed until now.

Speaker C Well, thanks, Julia. Thanks for speaking to that. And I also think maybe, Lee Shawn, to your point about the role that you might be playing, I'm hopeful that the openness that you're describing is felt across the National Board, certainly across all the different chapters. And my sense is that a lot of the chapters were already there and perhaps were waiting for national to catch up. But also I want to maybe impress that the kind of scrutiny that so much of people of color have experienced in their professional careers, especially in design, can be equally applied to the white male candidates who often apply not because we're trying to be anti white, but rather I want to make sure that they are really good. I've seen, unfortunately, a number of examples of less than amazing speakers who perhaps wonder, why are you on this stage? Why have we been conditioned to hold you above all others? I just want to make sure that we have some parity in that kind of evaluation and scrutiny that I know a lot of people of color who've worked in design for a long time often feel. So let's hope that's hope that that's what we can start to see and maybe to give a maybe make a little finer point, we've often used the phrase at a studio that we're looking to be more porous, as in allow more ideas, more thought, more people to come in and out of the studio more freely. And I'm hopeful that perhaps AIGA becoming a little more porous will benefit from that level of idea exchange and people exchange and culture exchange.

Speaker A I really like that idea of more porous. And I've also been thinking about the ways that leadership, not in terms of leadership as an individual people, but leadership as a quality of how somebody performs, being a leader is often gendered and racialized in different ways. Right. And like you Know, the classic example is like, you know, when the male leader is assertive, but when it's a woman, like she's, you know, she's the B word. And it's like things like that and like that kind of porous leadership or more like kind of democratic leadership, just from some of the feedback that we receive from other people. Like, it's not always legible what that means. Right. Or sometimes it's seen as like a lack of leadership or a kind of abdication of leadership rather than like a more maybe decentralized model or moving away from that kind of charismatic, single figure kind of model. But it's just different and can be made legible in other ways or requires effort to be made legible.

Speaker B All right, so as we move forward, George, I know you've built a solid career as a designer, educator, and also co founder and co executive director of Greater Good studio for almost 15 years now. I think I've seen many designers thrive in their careers, but many of them have a hard time transitioning from a designer to a business owner. And I wanted to hear from you, from a person that now owns a business itself and also did this transition. How was that process for you and what has been the biggest challenge so far?

Speaker C Thanks, Julie, for the question. I think if I were to just answer straight, it would appear as though I'm the only founder or I'm the only one that helped do this. That is completely not true. I'm suddenly one of the two co founders, two co owners, and I'd say the vast majority of those strategic decisions that my co founder made early on have set us up to be able to be in a place where there is stability and the sort of sageness that you're asking me to look back upon, I benefit from the decision she made and set up. So, Sarah Kanter, my co founder, it's probably her question to be answering, but I'd say certainly I can answer maybe like, what has been hard managing people has been impossibly hard because I still think that I still have a hard time managing myself. There is a massive gap in my leadership, I think, in terms of how to be an excellent manager growing from my career primarily as an individual contributor. There are a number of steps that I skipped and it's very difficult to make up for that time without having actual experience as a manager of people or of teams. And maybe that's the privilege of being a co founder. But I do know that I stress my team out in not having those skills. And it could be true that if you are a designer working in a company where there was a founder or owner that had a excellent track record as an individual contributor, and now suddenly you're in this position of co owner, it is interesting to maybe ask what training have they had in the mechanics of running the studio, in the mechanics of being a manager? I think that may be true of other fields, but I know design has this intoxicating narrative around expertise that perhaps doesn't translate to leadership, even leadership. Leshon, the one that we were talking about earlier, that perhaps just by default, people might be ascribing qualities that I don't really have or I'm still struggling to work out. So I'd say learning to manage the actual staff and the employees that we have and give them career pathways, that's really hard. Even just the idea of trying to design policies. Holy cow. I think I've gotten pretty good at maybe developing practices or even say norms, but a policy. I had a very powerful conversation with my director of operations who had to literally explain the definition for policy. And I'm realizing how little I knew about what that meant and realizing I don't know what I'm talking about and that perhaps I need to give them a lot more leeway about defining that because that's their role and that's their expertise. So there's a lot of maturing happening at the studio, I hope to say, and that we're probably in a big phase for the next five years as we kind of go from the first 0 to 10 and then 10 to 20. This is like the teenage years, as it were, because we're at year 14 this summer of trying to work out how to be a place that one can thrive in and not simply be an interesting notable outlier as a studio.

Speaker B Very cool. I remember attending a conference some years back where you were the keynote speaker. And one thing that stood out to me, and I got very inspired by, was the way you shared the working principles of Greater Good Studio. And by that was how you had the principle of saying no to some types of projects or some types of clients. So I wanted to hear more from you. How is that principle applied and how does it play in practice?

Speaker C Thanks for the question. Mechanically speaking, every week we have something that we call technically inside. We call it the BD charat, as in a conversation, an expensive conversation around business development. And in order to prepare for that meeting, Sarah I, one of the two co founders, share back our gut check rundown of what the latest business development might be answering. A series of questions that prompts that we've developed over many years around, what is the nature of this request and what is the nature of the project that this nonprofit client is asking of us? Is there anything kind of funky or weird or perhaps inappropriate? And we kind of put those questions in, in addition to maybe regular questions like, what's the budget? What's the timeline? Because I think it can sometimes get confusing to work out what are we really here to do? It's not to say by default that we're suspicious of anyone. I think we go in with good faith, but rather, it's so easy, especially for Sarah and I, to be somewhat manipulated by people who are dangling a project budget or opportunity, particularly in the social sector, that we might not catch all of the red flags that might be there. So as a way of accounting for a team and kind of asking them, hey, can you give us your minds and strategic thinking? Can you check this with us? Can you do your gut check without gut check and make sure we don't end up inadvertently doing something erroneous or worse, harmful? So we're on, I think, version five now. I think it may be the fifth edition of our gut check. It's probably overdue. Another one we've done. We do about 35 a year. So with our track record of what, almost 14 years, we've done hundreds of them now. It's something, I think, that's quite unique to our studio. I think we're quite serious about it. I had a chat. This is funny. I had a chat with this other leader of a design studio who I don't think realized that we were for real. And I think they were bringing towards an opportunity around. I think it was around maybe energy, some sort of, like, energy company. And once I realized, oh, this is a unique design help with a partner from us, like, us. But really, this is a business problem, not a social problem. I had to explain, like, that's not what we do. I'm really sorry. Like, I love you and I love this opportunity, but that's just not something we do. And I had to remind them, like, you know, like the stuff you see on the website, that's for real. Like, there isn't like another. Like another bank of portfolio that's like a back of house, front of house. That's all we do. It's pretty. There's no. It's pretty shallow in that regard. There isn't like two different. Two different types of books that we're trying to maintain. And I had to dawn on them as like, oh wait, that's it. I said, yeah, that's all we do. So oh, we shouldn't be having this conversation. And you know, he was, he was gracious about it. But I think it can still be a surprise to other co owners, sorry, other owners of businesses that we might not have another secret stash of commercial clients somehow funding all our work.

Speaker A Right. It's not a front for a corporate studio that's doing there Isn't like a.

Speaker C We're not confused. Although again, this is why we bring this up is that the risk of manipulation or I would even push it further, say self deception is ever present. I went through one of the hardest realizations last probably about a year ago with this so lovely folks who have an autonomous vehicle company. And I got so knotted in my head around what our goals were because we were feeling enormous amount of financial pressure as a studio at the time. And I started realizing how much I was convincing myself that there was merit beyond it being a business problem. And after a lot of realizations, and thankfully some students that I was working with, I kind of had a bit of a moment of realization and realized, oh shit, I got to get out of this. So I then sent the breakup email, one of my finest and have felt better ever since.

Speaker A Yeah, I wanted to pivot the conversation to the theme of this year's programming at aiga, both on the podcast and in our upcoming conference in LA this October. But we're exploring this intersection of design and performance. And performance can take many forms. Doing a podcast interview or speaking on an AIGA conference stage is a form of performance. But as designers, we're also performing when we're pitching a client for a new project or facilitating a workshop on a kickoff workshop or a co design workshop. And we know that in your studio you do these collaborative democratic activations and workshops and other ways of working that are maybe different from what we were saying before, the kind of like singular auteur kinds of designing. And so yeah, can you tell us more about this culture that you've been cultivating at Greater Good Studio? And then any sort of open ended reflections you might have on how you think about what it is to perform as a designer, as a leader?

Speaker C That's such a difficult and expensive question, Lee. Sean, thank you for that. Yeah, so I think the word performance can have so many different connotations from high performance or things that have like a horsepower or sports analogy or things that to do with excellence, things that feel like if you're in the National League, I don't know, whatever National League you might want to pick. I'm not a sports person.

Speaker A Yeah, neither am I. So I have no idea.

Speaker C You and I are maybe not the right people to ask this question, but if you want like top performer. Yeah, there's such a. I end up with a lot of images of aggressiveness and crushing goals and dominance that I. I don't have a lot to relate to. Yeah, unfortunately, I also have a. Another connotation suddenly because we worked in the search sector for so long, that performance can feel like it's insincere or that it's somehow fake. Or with a lot of folks who have expressed allyship to groups who have been marginalized, there could be a performative aspect of I'm your ally, as long as it doesn't really have to cost me to change anything or cost me in any way. So I wonder if in this context what we're talking about here is how does one be consistent? How does one think about leadership in a way that is maybe alternative to what we've been conditioned to think about? And how does performance mean? How am I going to show up in a way that feels as though outside of this moment in time, will it stand up to some kind of scrutiny many years later? So I think for our studio, one of the tough parts is balancing wanting to be a for profit business, which we've always been, but also do in a way that doesn't corrupt ourselves or our social mission, which we have as a studio. There are many ways that we could have designed our studio to make more money that have nothing to do with the work that we do at all. And I think in doing so we will simply have a business that justifies its own existence, that occasionally does social sector work. And I think if that was the case, maybe more akin to what the colleague I was talking to, the peer I was talking to, maybe what they were suspecting we did, I think we would qualify this as a performance. We would be maintaining this sort of like image of what we do. But I think what's interesting is to say can we be clear minded about what the purpose of this business is for and for us it is about being affordable to a group of people who don't typically have access to design studios or services, all in the purpose of social change. So if there is a performance, I'd be just asking what are we doing with this performance for? Is it to get to the top of some type of leaderboard? Okay, I don't know. Why is that to be the best at Something. I mean, there is merit in that, I guess. But is that it? Like, you know, like it could be that if there's a trophy or something that you hold aloft that has meaning. Maybe. But I wonder if perhaps there are larger goals or larger remits that the design studio could have that is a beyond winning awards or winning recognition. And it makes me wonder who are we really serving? For us, our clients are a means to get to impact. We love our clients.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker C Which is why we have to be so selective about them. So if we get. If we end up working for a client whose goals are so completely different than what we had originally set out, I think it would have. We'd be really annoying to work with.

Speaker A Totally.

Speaker C And I think it'd be really obvious that we were sort of like the wrong people. So I think it's clearer for us to be able to think about like our clients being a good match or that we might be a good match for some and we'd be a terrible match for others. So I want to be slightly less judgy around good studios, bad studios, good clients, bad clients, and about how well of a well suited the compatibility might be. So we want to be the people you call when you have a social mission. That's it. And if that's our performance that we get rated on, so be it. But I want to be clear that that's kind of what we are trying to judge ourselves about maybe and not get confused by being quote unquote, the number one design studio in the world. I don't know what you're judging that against. I've worked in places who have said that and I have wondered, thinking, who made the ranking? Was it you?

Speaker A Yeah. It's like those college rankings, right. It's like, what are the best universities you, besides Harvard at Stanford? It's like it's kind of the same every year, but they just kind of like switch chairs and. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C And I can't tell who it's it for. So who are we serving? Who is our clients? Or does it expose perhaps that what the design studio really is? Is it a profit center that happens to use design? If that's it, can we just say that out loud? Right. Versus we're trying to have impact. And the reality is that Sarah and I don't have personal wealth. We don't have access to wealth. We weren't born into the means that might have us have impact through foundation work or other types of philanthropy. We also weren't trained in medicine. So that's out of the picture, all we have is design, just the two of us. We're limited by that. So we want to take what we have been trained in and arm wrestle it into shape into the direction we want, because that's all we know. That's partly why we had this forced profit studio, because we didn't know how to start a nonprofit. All we did was just take what we've had that we knew about and let's redirect it to a different purpose. I think that that has meant that we now have certain baggage that comes with it. And also I think there's an opportunity because we're trying to do something new. But I think you have to be really clear minded, like, what is this really for? And I think it's not. I don't mind if you just say it's just to make a shit ton of money. I just want you to say it out loud and stop pretending it's about something else.

Speaker A Yeah. And I think that connects to a previous answer you had where you were talking about like you didn't have a separate front stage and backstage kind of game. Right. And it's like just as you were saying, like what's on your website for greater good studio is actually what you do. Or like trying to match get the right fit with your clients also avoids the thing that I've seen, you know, with other design studios where it's like you put on the dog and pony show for your clients and then as soon as they leave the room. Right. You're talking shit about them and there's this whole kind of like, you know, doing it for money but you kind of secretly hate your clients kind of thing, which it's like you're kind of saying that like the real authenticity here of this is like, yeah, trying to make that front stage backstage, like as aligned as possible. Right?

Speaker C Yeah. I think that actually the amount of workarounds you have as a studio owner to make all the self deception level out could all be replaced if you just figured out what are you doing this for. That alignment internally has all these downstream benefits because you no longer pretend to find the clients you want. You just have the clients that only want to work with you. You have great clarity over what the work is for, which then has resonance around who you attract. And actually going back to the very beginning, the idea of the pissed off optimist and wanting to say that out loud versus sort of like cryptically on our website was to say, I think those people exist and there's enough of them not only to, you know, work with as a design studio, but there's enough of us to actually cause real social change in the world. So we wanted to be explicit and not opaque about who we're looking for, because we think the more clear we can be, the less time we waste for them or for us around misregistering what the work is about.

Speaker B I'm curious to hear from you if there is any type of design, rule or principle that you love to break or that you clearly disagree with.

Speaker C Well, that's so hard for me, Julia, because I feel like I spent so much of my time coming up desperately hoping no one will notice that I'm not good at this or real at this. That activates so much of my imposter syndrome pretty hardcore. So the safety and the comfort that comes from adhering to those rules is hard to break. And yet what has been going alongside my professional journey is this journey around my racial identity and how much that understanding what was conditioned in me to mean what excellent was, what the rules were, what professional looks like, meant that perhaps in my own understanding of who I am, I might not be able to ever perform those, adhere to those rules. And I think my sense for a long time was, well, then I'm never going to be quite good enough. And I'm kind of trying to let go of some of the stringentness around those rules and realize, yes, there is merit to a degree. And yet how much of that rule acted as an inadvertent gatekeeper? Was it about perhaps maintaining the status quo of a very elite, narrow, small group, as opposed to truly understanding what excellence might be, which might be truth in expression, truth in who people are, and then having that expressed visually, tangibly in some way. So I'm realizing that I'm now in a place where underneath those rules of what excellent might be, there might be other rules that we don't hear as much about, which is just try to be as true to yourself as possible, and other people will recognize that that feels very different than how tightly you kern your type or how on trend your typeface might be or how much your color gradients are of the moment. It's been really hard to not get distracted by trend. And the trends that I grew up on, I have a certain kind of trend nostalgia for, which makes them very important to me. You know, the camp coming up in the 90s meant that there was a lot of particular ways of doing things for, you know, modernist views that I've. I'm not quite at the point where I'm now making everything in Comic Sans. But I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I don't know if I give a shit anymore about half the things that I used to think were that important. So. Okay, so maybe try to give you a real example. I am no longer concerned about typos in a cover letter or in an application or in people who apply. I would love to see your work, I'd love to see your thinking. But some of the things that you used to worry about, I've tried to let go of.

Speaker B That's great. That's a good example.

Speaker A Let's make sure. We asked you a question about your teaching. You had alluded to this before about how some students helped you rethink some of the. The professional work you were doing. Can you reflect as an educator on how you think design programs should focus on how do they prepare students to tackle the kind of social challenges and kind of social good design that you do now?

Speaker C Thanks so much, Lee Shawn, for asking that. I've been very lucky in that I found a new education institution at Northwestern. I used to teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who I continue to owe a big debt to because they took a risk on me because I never got a master's degree and it's not easy to get a teaching job without that. So I know that they stuck their neck out. But at Northwestern, what's interesting is that they were still trying to wonder what is the future of their master's program going to look like. And with new leadership at the Engineering Design Innovation Program, they invited me to create a new class called Ethics and Identity in Design. And that class has been really transformative for me in that I didn't know if anybody cared about these topics and I don't know if I knew I had enough to teach about this topic. So that's a whole other thing. But in teaching it and actually more recently working with, with Amy who runs a program placing that class in a cornerstone moment during the first quarter of the two year program means that you can no longer avoid used to be this thing where the class was an elective, whereas now it is a foundational party. I don't know what the opposite. It's a required. Yeah, required class. And that just means that we had to make some choices about what can no longer be in that place when something is now required. So I took it as a real commitment to center an ethical stance and to center humans and to center working with a real critical view as to how and why we do the work, not just that we can and we do it with a certain level of execution or of fidelity. Those other reasons seem to be pretty often forgotten or added as a bonus with primacy around execution and resolution. Whereas now we might be able to say how and why we do things might be just as important as the outcomes themselves. And balancing those two, I think is always going to be hard. But in a program like this, I feel like they've taken a stance to say, we think it's important enough that we place it front and center.

Speaker B Very cool.

Speaker C Yeah, thanks, Ishaan. Yeah, I was going to maybe say one more thing in that maybe about a couple of years after the AIG letter, I came to a real crossroads about whether or not I should do something that I thought was going to be kind of politically sorry, like, risky for my career. And that was specifically around a letter called Surviving ideo. And I don't know how much of the students who I was working with at the time even realized how I was very, very stuck between two parts of whether to pursue the letter or not. And this is like sitting over there looking at this first batch of students, final grades, reading their essays, and realizing that I've been harping on about how you have to try to make a. You'll find yourself often a fork in the road and have to decide which way you want to go. And yeah, I'm realizing I can never teach this class again if I don't take the quote unquote, right choice or right for me, even if the right one might be the scariest or the hardest. So that class so clearly impacted whether or not I should do something that I feel like I owe it in a very mellow way, owe that class a lot, because I think it shaped actually where my career is now, practicing some of the things that we've talked about or the. This whole interview.

Speaker A Yeah, yeah, there's that sort of like teaching by example. Right. There's like the things that you do that are in your syllabus and then there's the things that you do, like in your. The way that you show up in your professional life and in your kind of personal political commitments in that sense. And like how that is an example for students.

Speaker C Yeah, I mean, I think what's so hard about it is that it's so much easier to simply tell people what to do and then walk away because. Yeah, who's going to call me out on this? Like, it's not that often that I'm going to get checked. So I could get away with that for a long time. It's just, I think it becomes very. It will gnaw on you when you don't maybe follow through. And it's. I remember thinking it's through several moments in my career that that sense of gnawing self doubt or the creepiness of self deception is a feeling I'm trying to not lose touch with. But I'm older than I was, obviously. I'm like almost 50 now. And I'm trying to still keep in touch with that feeling of am I lying to myself about this? I sometimes can't tell. And I worry that it will be a long time before I can tell I've lost it because it would have happened some time ago and I've already moved on.

Speaker A Totally. Yeah, I feel like we could do a whole episode on the surviving ideo letter that you bravely signed on to. But just in general about labor conditions in design studios and agencies. Not even singling out idea or that. But these are things that are unfortunately pervasive in our industry and things that maybe I think need to be talked about more certainly with students and with other folks in terms of just what to expect on the job and how you deal with it and denormalizing some of these toxic workplace things as well.

Speaker B George, do you have any type of book or a movie or show or any type of media that you would recommend to our listeners, something that has inspired you lately?

Speaker C Yeah, so I listened on book on tape, as it were. I listened on an audiobook of a book called Poverty by America by Desmond. Shoot, I have to remember his last name. Yeah, I've forgotten his last name now. It was amazing. It does such a thorough job of untangling the harmful narratives about what makes people poor and keeps them poor and what helps people who are not temporarily poor less likely to slip and fall down that slippery slope towards poverty. And the ways in which language to describe a government handout is exclusive to one group and not the other, and that tax breaks are seen as a while. You must be smart enough to figure that out. Versus hey, that is another government handout. So the general premise is can we please tax those who need to be taxed? And for those who need to be taxed, can you please do your part and actually pay your share? And your avoidance shouldn't be seen and viewed as a neat way of an indication of how smart you are, but actually get relabeled as your avoidance of your social responsibility. So that book has nothing to do with design in any Formal sense. But if you think about how rules tend to indicate behavior, and that designing systems through series of rules, to me sounds a lot like design. So if we're designing societies and designing certainly how the most wealthy in this country act and behave, to me, that feels like it's something that is open for design because people have already applied a lot of intent behind those rules, and it's working exactly as planned. So, yeah, I definitely think it's been designed that way, but you have to kind of like, wrap your head around it and go, oh, right. Well, we've designed this system to work very efficiently towards growing the wealth of a very small number and to extract as much value out of everybody else. Shoot. I really wish maybe, Lee, Shawn, you can help me figure out the name of that.

Speaker A Yeah, we'll look this up and we'll put it in the show notes of folks. But, yeah, like. Yeah, this point too. Right. Like, on systems, I think designers, it behooves us to understand, like, the larger economic and political systems we're doing work in. Even if a book that you're suggesting, George, is not directly related to the craft of design. Maybe. But, yeah, it's like, what are we doing? It reminds me of that meme that was going around of things that are classy if you're rich, but trashy if you're poor, and one of them is getting money from the government or speaking multiple languages. All of these things where it's literally the same thing, but it's just coded in such different ways based on somebody's socioeconomic status.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker C And I think that conditioning that comes with that coding means that we view in very stark terms who should be given the benefit of the doubt or who should be deemed unworthy. You know, similarly, along those lines, I feel like I've been doing a little volunteering with this group called the Chicago Community Jail Support that's here in Chicago that does a lot of work with folks who are leaving, who gets put back out on the street from Cook County Jail, and the number of stories I think that people make up about people being detained and then put back out, I think is not helping anyone. And the utterly inhumane way in which Cook county does that right now makes you sort of question, why is it happening this way? Is it because you don't think of them as real humans? Probably so, yeah. There's a lot of powerful narratives, both mostly harmful, actually, that I think dictate a lot of how we see the world. And I think our job as designers could be to reshape what those narratives are.

Speaker A Thank you for that suggestion. Again, we'll post those links and we'll post links to your site, Greater Good Studio site as well. But we'd like to just as a final thing so folks can hear it. And so you say that. Can you just do a call to action to wrap us up in terms of where folks can find you and your work if they want to follow up with this episode?

Speaker C Thanks very much. Yeah, please take a look@greatergoodstudio.com our website has a lot of our latest work and a lot of reasons as to why we exist. We have some social channels that you can also track us on from LinkedIn to some others. And yeah, I would say, sunny, while I think we're great, there's a lot of local nonprofits that are in your area that I think really deserve your design attention, whether it's from just volunteering through to thinking about them as a strategic partner. I think all those organizations would really benefit from having a design thinker or someone who thinks about design give them an ask and say, hey, have we thought about our programs a little differently? So, yeah, let's try to work locally as much as we can.

Speaker A Wonderful. Yeah. Thanks for that advice and for those resources. George A. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, the audience, for listening or watching. If you're seeing this on YouTube, and we'll see you on another episode of the AIG Design Podcast.

Speaker C Thanks so much for having me, folks.

George Aye, Pissed-Off Optimist and Co-Founder of Greater Good Studio

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