AIGA Design Podcast

The official podcast feed of AIGA, the professional association for design. We explore various facets of the design discipline, profession, and industry to help our listeners learn about the past and present and prepare for the future.

AIGA Design Podcast is a arts podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 141 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts AIGA Design Podcast, a arts show with 141 episodes published.

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  Episode #13

  Crafting Your Narrative: From Hackathons to AI with Sally Chung, Founder, Designpreneurs

  Aug 19, 20261 hourS11

  In this episode, hosts Lee-Sean Huang and Giulia Donatello sit down with Sally Chung, a designer, startup founder, professor at Parsons School of Design, and former faculty member at SVA. From her early days as a founding designer at Saks Fifth Avenue to building an SMS AI beauty chatbot in 2016 and leading zero-to-one ventures at BCGX, Sally has continuously navigated the balance between corporate scale and entrepreneurial agility. She shares how she founded the Designpreneurs Hackathon to build a thriving ecosystem connecting designers, universities, and tech founders, and offers an insider’s look at how AI is reshaping interaction design education and hiring expectations at Parsons. In This EpisodeBuilding AI before the hype. Sally reflects on co-founding Hello Ava in 2016—an SMS AI beauty advisor—years before ChatGPT went mainstream. The experience taught her that technology alone never wins; true product-market fit comes from listening directly to user frustrations rather than focusing on the tech itself. Designing a career narrative. From corporate in-house teams to living in a co-worker's basement to launch a startup, Sally discusses why designers must stop apologizing for a "zigzag" career path and proactively craft their own strategic narrative. The survivor mindset in innovation. Drawing on her work launching ventures at BCGX, Sally outlines why smart ideas fail and what keeps surviving companies alive: rapid market adaptability, relentless testing loops, smart distribution channels, and a founder's resilience. Cultivating an ecosystem through hackathons. Sally breaks down how a weekend project to help her SVA students build portfolios evolved into the Designpreneurs Hackathon—a tight-knit community that pairs hackers with senior mentors from IDEO, Meta, and Spotify, resulting in real hires, startup acquisitions, and venture funding. The shift in design hiring. Sally reveals why a "pixel-perfect" portfolio no longer guarantees a job. As execution becomes automated, top design leaders are hiring for strategic systems thinking, multi-stakeholder navigation, and versatility across non-UI or agentic experiences. Rethinking design education at Parsons. Advising on curriculum changes, Sally emphasizes that design schools should stop teaching software tools that students can learn on TikTok, and return to analog craftsmanship, strategic problem-solving, and a foundational creative eye. What remains human. Reflecting on her panel at South by Southwest, Sally highlights that while AI can optimize toward goals, only humans can choose which goals matter. She stresses that real, in-person community is the ultimate antidote to digital loneliness. ResourcesSally Chung's Official Website – http://sallyhychung.comSally Chung on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallyhchung/Sally's Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/sallyinutopiaDesignpreneurs – https://www.designpreneurs.comSame As Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel – https://amzn.to/4qpoTWMAIGA Design Podcast Feedback – podcast@aiga.org

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  Episode #12

  AI’s Magic Wand in the No-Collar Economy with Martin LeBlanc, Chief Experience Officer at Magnific

  Aug 5, 202647 minS11

  In this episode, hosts Lee-Sean Huang and Giulia Donatello welcome Martin LeBlanc, Chief Experience Officer at Magnific (the AI creative platform formerly known as Freepik). A designer and entrepreneur with 25 years of experience across computer science, business, and creativity, Martin founded Iconfinder—which grew into a global design asset marketplace before being acquired by Magnific. Together, they explore how generative AI is shifting creative execution, why large organizations struggle to adapt to systemic changes, and how designers can retain control of their creative authorship. Martin also provides a live walkthrough of Magnific's node-based canvas, illustrating how generative AI can be integrated into repeatable, professional design systems without training on user data. In This Episode Empowering vs. disrupting design . Reflecting on his 25 years in design, Martin acknowledges that AI disrupts old workflows while empowering creators to reinvent how they build. He stresses that designers historically adapt and win when they actively direct new technology. The "Magic Wand" product philosophy . Magnific balances two priorities: keeping tools simple for beginners via auto-settings, while embedding granular, professional controls just beneath the surface for advanced directors. Rewriting the rules of production . AI lowers financial and technical barriers for independent creators. Complex ad campaigns and visual effects that once required massive studios or green screens can now be produced by solo creators or small teams. Designing repeatable systems . Demonstrating Magnific's node-based canvas ("Spaces"), Martin shows how prompts, manual edits, vector design, and automated translations combine to form shareable, repeatable production pipelines. The "Tsunami" moment and pivot . Martin details how Freepik navigated its shift to an "AI-first" company and rebrand to Magnific. Seeing how AI would disrupt traditional stock assets, the company launched an internal "Labs" unit to develop future-facing tools. The "No-Collar Economy" and taste . As AI lowers technical hurdles, a designer’s true value shifts to discernment, curation, and taste—knowing what to keep, what to scrap, and how to refine the final 20% of a piece. IP, authorship, and data privacy . Magnific protects user rights with full commercial licenses, zero customer data training, and a downloadable "lineage" metadata trail to help designers prove human authorship. Getting started through side projects . For designers overwhelmed by rapid AI updates, Martin advises focusing on hands-on side projects and workflow mechanics rather than chasing tool hype. Resources Magnific (30% AIGA Community Discount on Annual Premium Plans) – https://referral.magnific.com/aiga?mz Martin's Podcast Demo Workflow (Magnific Space) – https://www.magnific.com/app/spaces/a243c19e-c681-4e82-ad7e-4b28a66f9599/invite?payload=eyJpdiI6Ikg1VWhOZzlla2RoTGNLQzB6QjlRRkE9PSIsInZhbHVlIjoidlRHMjNKR01kRVRPSS83MUtsZEt2bUFIWk1SYWRLcnF4NWNXRk1GdzBFdzlxMDQ2OTJnWnluaHcyMkJnWExOckFCN0JxME1UTUpUZEZOb0FrWXRaemd6cGw0Rkx3b1RENU1VRWFiYk5ncnJCNEdqYTRzZ1gxeWEyTUZaRUZXRDYiLCJtYWMiOiI3M2IwODYzYTY2MmY0YzkzZGYzNjJjNjRiZDg5MWZiOTM2ODJlM2Q3YWE3MjQyYzcwZTkyOTA3YjY0NzdlZTVlIiwidGFnIjoiIn0 The No-Collar Economy White Paper – https://www.reasonwhy.es/media/library/no-collar-white-paper.pdf Magnific Academy Tutorials – https://www.magnific.com/academy AIGA Design Podcast Feedback and Voicemails – podcast@aiga.org

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  Episode #11

  Norm Design: The Invisible Architecture of Social Challenges with Jeff Leitner

  Jul 14, 202652 minS11

  In this episode, hosts Lee-Sean Huang and Giulia Donatello sit down with Jeff Leitner, the co-founder of UX for Good, architect of Norm Design, and a partner to organizations ranging from the US State Department and NASA to Harvard Medical School. Together, they unpack the core ideas behind his Summer 2026 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, "The Science of Norm Design," exploring why smart, well-funded initiatives fail roughly 70% of the time. Jeff shares his extensive experience studying the "invisible architecture" of social environments. He offers a critical challenge to the design industry, inviting practitioners to look past boilerplate briefs and standard user research to systematically uncover and design for the unwritten rules that dictate human behavior. In This Episode Here is the section trimmed down by 25% for a faster, punchier read, with all text formatted in plain text: The definition of norm design. Jeff defines norm design as an essential layer built on top of traditional research to uncover a group's informal, unwritten rules. Because every solution lands within a complex social ecosystem, these hidden dynamics ultimately dictate whether a design succeeds or fails. The 70% organizational failure rate. Stagnant for decades, the standard failure rate for organizational change is famously high. The uncomfortable reality is that most interventions fail because they inadvertently obey the exact same unwritten rules as the problems they are trying to fix. The New Orleans musicians' paradox. Partnering with UX for Good to help local musicians, who average $24,000 a year, the team found that standard financial literacy training routinely failed. A norm-based approach revealed that musicians viewed asking for tips as humiliating. By bypassing the ask and adding a tipping line directly to club receipts, they successfully transferred thousands of dollars to bands. Unwritten rules vs. employee manuals. Social norms are rarely documented. To find a company's true constraints, Jeff suggests asking employees what they would tell a best friend over drinks about "how the place really works," rather than what's printed in the onboarding manual. The structural empathy trap. While designers champion empathy, leaning too deeply into a user's perspective can cause researchers to absorb the same invisible constraints that the target group can't see, effectively blinding the designer to the overarching social norms. Empathy vs. compassion in Rwanda. At the Kigali Genocide Memorial, the team challenged the default industry strategy of showing horror to inspire action. Brain research shows that witnessing suffering floods our pain circuits, causing distress, fatigue, and shutdown. By profiling ordinary heroes, they engaged the brain's compassion networks to cultivate the will to act. How success derailed NASA. Jeff discovered that 100% of interviewed NASA staff anchored their operational norm to JFK's 1962 "Moonshot" speech. However, waiting for a singular political figure to rally the public blinded the agency to the modern reality of private spaceflight, turning a historic triumph into a systemic roadblock. Resources The Science of Norm Design by Jeff Leitner ( Stanford Social Innovation Review ) – https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the-science-of-norm-design Leitner Studio Official Website – leitnerstudio.com UX for Good Nonprofit – uxforgood.org Cracking the Code of Change by Nitin Nohria and Michael Beer, the original source of the 70% failure rate of change initiatives (Harvard Business Review) – https://hbr.org/2000/05/cracking-the-code-of-change AIGA Design Podcast Feedback and Voicememos – podcast@aiga.org

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  Episode #10

  The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life with Ian Bogost

  Jul 7, 20261h 2mS11

  In this episode, hosts Lee-Sean Huang and Giulia Donatello sit down with Ian Bogost, a writer, designer, media scholar, contributing writer at The Atlantic , and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Together, they explore the concept of "dematerialization" and the core ideas behind his latest book, This Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life . Ian shares how his multifaceted career, navigating both software design and cultural criticism, functions as a dialectical machine for understanding how human meaning is constructed. He challenges contemporary design dogmas around "frictionlessness" and outcomes-based UX, offering a refreshing invitation for designers to embrace mundane constraints, celebrate accidental experience, and reconnect with the sensory enchantment of everyday life. In This Episode The designer-critic dialectic. Ian describes his career as a perpetual cycle between making and criticizing. For him, creating an object or game is a method of asking a question, while writing criticism is a vehicle for answering it—both serving the ultimate mystery of how humans derive meaning. Happiness vs. satisfaction vs. gratification. Ian breaks down three tiers of contentment. While happiness looks at long-term macro circumstances, satisfaction focuses on the pride of completing a project, and gratification is the fleeting, immediate sensory enchantment of the present moment—like ice clinking in a water bottle. The "wicked problem" of the modern door. Revisiting Don Norman's famous concept, Ian argues that modern doors don't fail due to bad design, but from an accumulation of competing successes. Fire codes, ADA compliance, and motorized automation layer, so many good intentions that the physical object ends up resisting us. The outcome trap of experience design. Ian observes that as design became heavily filtered through the computing sector, fields like interaction and UX design slowly stopped prioritizing actual experience . Instead, they focused intensely on business outcomes and optimized targets for organizations. Why "meaningful friction" is the wrong answer. Addressing the push to bring back "meaningful friction" to combat ultra-smooth glass screens, Ian calls the trend wrongheaded. Users don't want a task to be harder; they want a tactile loop of sensory connection to the machine, like a knob turning in defined physical increments. The vicarious gratification of ASMR. Reflecting on digital phenomena like ASMR and online "drain-clearing" videos, Ian views these creators as heroes. By treating ordinary objects with deep respect, they model a curiosity that can transform how viewers interact with their own everyday environments. Living life sideways through orthogonality. Ian advocates for "orthogonality"—diversifying one’s diet of sensory encounters by crossing boundaries into entirely different fields. True innovation arises from deeply exploring secondary constraints and productively marrying two completely unrelated domains. Resources Ian Bogost's Official Website – https://bogost.com/ This Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost – https://amzn.to/4ypiHBR The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman – https://amzn.to/4gWhSd8 Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames by Ian Bogost – https://amzn.to/4p5IQBf Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games by Ian Bogost – https://amzn.to/4eZwgyD Julian Bleecker – https://julianbleecker.com/ Bruce Sterling – https://bruces.medium.com/ Listener feedback and voicemails – podcast@aiga.org

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  Episode #9

  Design and Hope with Rinat Sherzer

  Jun 30, 202653 minS11

  In this episode, hosts Lee-Sean Huang and Giulia Donatello welcome back Rinat Sherzer—a biotech engineer, transdisciplinary designer, artist, and adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design whose work sits at the intersection of science, technology, and social justice. Together, they discuss the deep human construct of hope, unpacking how it differs from mere wishful thinking and exploring how designers can act as vital conduits for it. Rinat shares her journey from scientific training to social innovation, the unpredictable ripple effects of her global projects, and how she balances multi-sensory design, teaching, and motherhood through an intentional quarterly focus. In This Episode The logic of the backward glance. Rinat shares her journey from biotechnology engineering into tech and ultimately to design for social innovation. Mirroring Steve Jobs' famous sentiment, she notes that the dots of a multidisciplinary career can often only be connected in hindsight. The history and bad rep of hope. When researching the framework of hope for her PhD, Rinat was struck by its historical negativity. From Plato viewing it as an unreliable guide to Nietzsche labeling it the worst of all evils, it wasn't until Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in 1946 that hope was structurally recognized as a vital resource for human survival. The three dimensions of hope framework. Moving beyond Richard Snyder's purely cognitive, goal-oriented approach, Rinat's framework treats hope as an embodied, immersive experience. It breaks down into three dimensions: the extreme moment (crisis or joy) where hope is born, the greater social good if that hope comes to fruition, and the concrete, physical action an individual can take. Breaking bread and multi-sensory co-design. Rinat breaks down her immersive project, The Rebirth of Hope, which utilizes sound and taste to tap into primal, nonverbal memories. By choosing raw ingredients that resonate with their personal dimensions of hope, participants create a literal "bite of hope" to consume collectively, bridging the deeply personal with the universal synergy of a group. Translating data into human music. The Rebirth of Hope project actively translated participant choices into real-time visual musical scores. By mapping hope attributes to chords, rhythm, and melody, a live band performed the collective, experimental music of the exhibition's audience. The accountability gap in design education. As a faculty member at Parsons, Rinat addresses the split between the theory of "design for good" and the messy reality of execution. She argues that standard academic design thinking often leaves prototyping and testing to the very end, missing the vital skills of real-world implementation, business case development, and multi-team collaboration. The organizing cadence of a year. To juggle a global teaching schedule, running her studio (The Creative Lab), artistic output, and raising her son Luca, Rinat rejects daily micromanagement. Instead, she structures her life by dividing the year into quarters, allowing herself to intensely focus on one major priority at a time while setting strict, non-negotiable boundaries for family. Resources Rinat Sherzer's Official Website – renatsherzer.com Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl – https://amzn.to/4geMQgv The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin– https://amzn.to/4aukCdW The Bloody Taboo with Power to Change the World (Rinat's TEDx Talk) – https://www.ted.com/talks/rinat_sherzer_the_bloody_taboo_with_the_power_to_change_the_world AIGA Design Podcast Feedback and Voicemails – podcast@aiga.org

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