Confrence Schedule
Thursday, October 20
8:00 a.m. Registration and check-in begins
8:00–12:30 p.m. Educator Pre-Conference Track (SURFACE)*
2:00–3:30 p.m. General Session
3:30–4:15 p.m. Break
4:15–6:15 p.m. General Session
All times US Pacific. Schedule subject to change.
*Hosted by AIGA Design Educators Community. Included in Educator Conference Ticket.
Friday, October 21
8:00–9:00 a.m. Breakfast
8:00–8:45 a.m. Design Dialogues (optional)
9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Studios: Letterpress, Type, and Lettering*
9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Symposia
12:00–2:00 p.m. Lunch + Design Fair Open
12:15–1:00 p.m. Design Dialogues (optional)
2:00–3:30 p.m. General Session
3:30–4:15 p.m. Break
4:15–6:15 p.m. General Session
6:45–8:15 p.m. AIGA Awards Reception*
Saturday, October 22
8:00–9:00 a.m. Breakfast
8:00–8:45 a.m. Design Dialogues (optional)
9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Studios: Letterpress, Type, and Lettering*
9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Symposia
12:00–2:00 p.m. Lunch + Design Fair Open
12:15–1:00 p.m. Design Dialogues (optional)
2:00–3:30 p.m. General Session
3:30–4:15 p.m. Break
4:15–6:15 p.m. General Session
All times US Pacific. Schedule subject to change.
*Additional Fee Applies
Conference
Rick Griffith Brian Collins
Rick Griffith has been a full-time designer, occasional writer, teacher, activist and printer, who produces, collects and loves artifacts (often made of paper) that are sometimes qualified to be discussed as art. He is working on being a more
frequent writer. He has plenty to say. He participates in a studio called MATTER, and every Saturday he works in the shop at MATTER; these are both enterprises and collaborations with his Partner Debra Johnson. He is a dad, nephew, son, and brother. He is a Black, British-born West-Indian person and an immigrant, and he works in Denver, CO and Brooklyn, NY.
Brian Collins is Chief Creative Officer of COLLINS, an independent strategy and experience design company in San Francisco and New York City. In their work, they aim to mix imagination, craft and technology to build brands that can’t be ignored. They were named by Forbes as one of the companies reshaping the future of brand building. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Businessweek, Creativity, Fortune, NBC News, MSNBC, ABC News and Fast Company, which named Brian an American Master of Design. COLLINS was the first design company to appear on the AdAge A-List and was awarded their Design Agency of the Year in 3 consecutive years from 2019 to 2021.
Moderators
Lee-Sean Huang
Lee-Sean Huang is the Director of Design Content & Learning at AIGA. He also co-founded Foossa, a design and strategy consultancy focused on social innovation and transformative learning. He has taught courses in design and innovation
at New York University, the Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and the College of Staten Island. He has also developed and taught courses for online learning platforms like CreativeLive, Knowable, and Highbrow. He earned a bachelors in Government from Harvard and a masters in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU.
Debbie Millman
Debbie Millman is host of the award-winning podcast Design Matters, one of the world’s first and longest running podcasts; Chair of the first ever Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts, Editorial Director of PrintMag.com,
and the author of seven books on design and branding. She has worked on the design and strategy of over 200 of the world’s largest brands. Her most recent book, Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People, was recently published by Harper Collins.
Guest
Tim Allen
Tim Allen was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business for 2017. He leads the global product design, research, content and operations team at Instacart, centered on food access and inclusivity. His focus on fueling human potential is key to building products and cultures that inspire people to do their best work. As an additional outlet for his passion around design thinking, Tim speaks and instructs at schools and events around the country.
Tim’s work has been recognized with several of the industry’s most esteemed awards, including multiple Cannes Cyber Lions, D&AD, ANDY, Webby and OneShow awards. Named in the Creativity 50, Creativity magazine’s 2013 list of the year’s most inspiring and influential creative figures, he also played a key role on the award-winning R/GA team who created Nike+, the platform named Campaign of the Decade by AdWeek magazine, Nike Training Club, Nike’s first ever iOS App, and Nike.com.
Michael Aberman
Michael Aberman is an independent graphic designer and one-half of Frank, a small publishing imprint for artist projects. Before starting his own studio, he held positions at the Aspen Art Museum (Design Director, 2012–2017) and Walker Art Center (Graphic Design Fellow, 2011–2012). Michael was the Designer-in-Residence at moCa Cleveland in 2018.
Phil Balagtas
Phil is a design leader based in San Francisco, CA and has been a practicing designer for over 20 years. He has experience working across a variety of devices and platforms within non-profit, retail, advertising, and enterprise software organizations. He most recently served as a Design Director at General Electric (GE) Aviation to transform and enhance their digital businesses and strategies. He is also the founder of the Design Futures Initiative, a
nonprofit dedicated to the advancement and education of Futures Thinking. Today he is a part-time visiting design professor at Tecnológico de Monterey in Mexico City and leads his own consulting
Audrey Bennett
Audrey Grace Bennett is the Director of the DESIS Lab at Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design and an inaugural University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor at the University of Michigan. She is also a former Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She studies the design of transformative images that, through interactive aesthetics, can permeate cultural boundaries and impact how we think
and behave towards good social change. Awarded with the 2022 AIGA Steve Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary, her research publications include “How Design Education Can Use Generative Play to Innovate for Social Change,” International Journal of Design; Engendering Interaction with Images; “The Rise of Research in Graphic Design,” Design Studies: Theory and Research in Design; “Interactive Aesthetics,” Design Issues; and “Good Design is Good Social Change,” Visible Language.
Speakers Jialun Wang
Jialun Wang is a designer and scholar from China and is currently based in New York and Boston. He pursues a plural cultural narrative in graphic design practices and hopes to bring this pluralism to a broader audience. Jialun’s work focus on typography, branding, design theory, and design strategy. His work has been recognized by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Communication Arts, Boston Art Book Fair, and showcased worldwide.
Aaron Ganci
Aaron Ganci is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Communication Design at Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University, Indianapolis (IUPUI). As a practitioner-scholar with expertise in graphic design, user interface design, and co-design research methodologies, Professor Ganci is a frequent consultant on the design of websites and software interfaces with scholars from Medicine, Nursing, Computer
Science, Liberal Arts, and Informatics. In addition to professional creative activity, Professor Ganci studies how design artifacts enable systems of injustice in American life.
