From the podium to an underground wrestling ring.

September 2011

I had the pleasure of spending  a memorable weekend in Nashville with the fine people of AIGA Nashville. James LaCroix kindly invited me to speak at AIGA ThinkTANK ’11 about the role of design and social services in social change, alongside a solid line up: Kate Bingaman, Justin Ahrens, and Joe Duffy.

For the first time ever, I opened a conference, and consequently, stealing at least one or two talking points from each of my fellow speakers – Hello Justin While almost nothing I said provided concrete professional assistance to the audience, I spent the best part of an hour discussing our role as designers working in current affairs, social and environmental movements, and how we can all simply and ethically change the world for the better. I showed photos of Tent City in Tel Aviv from my recent trip in Israel, discussed the true role of Twitter and SMS in the February 2011 protests in Cameroon, shared the extraordinary story of the One Million Voices Facebook group and protests in 2008 which ignited the events that lead to the dismissal of the FARC in Columbia, talked about the iPhone 4 antennagate in the summer of 2010 and told jokes about the “New-Now-Retired-Gap” logo. I was apparently hilarious which is one of the best compliments I’ve received for a talk!

Next was Kate who showed and spoke very eloquently about her work on obsessive consumption and her visceral need to draw by hand everyday. While most of us have bursts of creativity and seek inspiration in the extraordinary, Kate thrives on the mundanity of daily life and exerts monk-like discipline by producing work every day. Since 2006, she’s been drawing something that she purchases every day and with that created zines, exhibitions, artifacts to sell, but also published a book in the spring of 2010 containing a selection of the first three years of daily drawings. Kate is also a huge proponent of designing in the open, no matter how personal it is. In 2004, she decided to start drawing her credit card statements every month until they were paid off -it took her nearly six years.

After lunch, Justin shared his journey to becoming a designer and his recent experiences in affecting change through design in the slums of West Africa with Life In Abundance. When he first approached them to help redesign all their collateral, pro-bono, he was told by the Executive Director that he needed to go Africa before doing anything. So he did. Since, Justin has spent a significant amount of time in Kenya, Somalia, Soudan, Ethiopia, etc. documenting the work of various NGOs, helping them tactically and strategically with design to empower people, and more recently devising a program combining education, entrepreneurship and social commitment for craftwomen/men in the largest of Nairobi. Justin nearly made everyone in the room cry, several times.

Finally Joe Duffy closed the conference by talking about Country music, life, and design. Using his extraordinary body of work – from the Bahamas logo to Minute Maid packaging to Herradura Tequila, he shared his philosophy and approach to graphic design and thoughts in our role as designers in making life better.

The conference wrapped up with a panel discussion where we shared our day-to-day experiences as design practitioners. While none of us knew each other prior to the conference and have very different career trajectories, we all spoke about our role and responsibilities as designers in affecting deep positive change locally and elsewhere.

As with every conference, everyone ended up in a bar. One conversation after another, James and Josh Hernandez started to talk about Nashville underground wrestling nights on Fridays and Saturdays at Stadium Inn. Needless to say that within half an hour, we were all in a seedy motel next to the freeway watching amateur wrestling. All I will say is that I (Kate and Justin) truly hope that it will become a ThinkTANK tradition Enjoy!

All in all it was a fantastically well organized conference thanks to Stephanie, James, and all of the AIGA Nashville board and volunteers. Many thanks again for having me.

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