013: Gage Mitchell of AIGA Seattle and more

Let's welcome Gage Mitchell.

And I said so I said, can you ask those designers what advice they have for me when I graduate here in a year? And they said two things. Show your portfolio to as many people as possible so you get comfortable talking about your work and join AIGA.

So we started organizing events like portfolio shows, we did studio tours, we had screen printing events, we had lectures, we did poster show, we did all sorts of fun stuff as a group. And then that got me into the kinda connected into the AIGA Colorado scene where I was something of a student adviser or connection to the chapter up in Fort Collins, Colorado. And we would bring, like, groups of students down to the big AIGA Colorado events, things like that. So I just found out about it, got kind of got hooked on the community building side of it and got to meet so many people. It just started opening up doors right away before I'd even graduated school.

All of a sudden, I had all these, you know, very well connected people in the Colorado design scene who knew me and were happy to help me figure out what my next steps were. And before I even graduated college, I had a job, just through those connections. So I think I got found my way in through that and got hooked and just kept going from there.

We were in Fort Collins, had the vice president of the chapter at the time, Don Putney, up in the area. So I could lean on her to host us for some events or have her come speak at, at some of our events as well. Then she connected us to some other folks too.

So my girlfriend at the time and I, we just I think it was called findyourspot.com. There's a website where you could just put in your interests and it would tell you which cities you might be interested in. Oh, wow.

We were going to keep going up to like, you know, Baltimore and DC and other places. But once we hit North Charlotte, North Carolina, we got there and it just had a good vibe. It felt like it's a place where we could settle. It was fairly low cost of living at the time. It had a kind of booming new city and interesting culinary scene.

And I don't know. I just checked some boxes. So we just decided, well, let's stop let's stop driving and find an apartment and go get some jobs. And that's how I got involved with the AIGA Charlotte cruise. When I landed there, I was trying to get plugged in and find my people.

And they had a board that was kind of burning out at the time. Okay. So they were kind of I think it had fizzled down to, like, two board members that were left or something and they were struggling to get things going. So myself and a handful of other people that were new to the city because there was just tons of people pouring into Charlotte. Was there were lots of lots of jobs and it was the headquarters of a few banks so there's lots of money being poured in.

A lots of new designers as well. So I think we ended up like having 10 new board member like it was fizzling. They couldn't sustain the chapter. They were thinking about maybe even closing it. And then all of a sudden a board of like 10 new leaders like we'll take over.

So I just connected with the president and the events director at the time and asked if I could get involved and I started organizing some, social events. I think I called them morning buzz. Kind of borrowed that idea from AIGA Colorado. They had a coffee event there where you just get together and talk to people who showed up about a different topic. So I started organizing that, then joined the board, then ended up kind of on the executive leadership team after a few years.

Again, all these people are moving there and you can buy a mansion for what a one bedroom studio apartment costs in New York. Right. So there are like these big house communities that were being built and that was just connection my boss had at the time. So we're doing these really cool brand projects with beautiful print pieces and that side of it was fun. But we were selling things that I just didn't feel like needed to exist.

Like how how many people really need a 5,000 square foot house with, you know, 10 bedrooms empty because they don't use them for anything in a community that used to be a farm, which we could have actually used. Right. It turned into like a a mansion factory. I like doing the nonprofit work, but I just didn't love doing that stuff that just felt like it was making rich people richer. So I got a little, disillusioned and my partner at the time got disillusioned in her job.

She was working too much and didn't love her bosses. So at some point we just said, let's quit everything and and go travel. So we sold our condo, we quit our jobs and we just left the country not knowing when we'd come back. Did that for a little while. When we did come back, it was the bottom of the 02/2009, '2 thousand and '8 kind of recession.

So we knew when we came back, we needed to move somewhere with low cost of living and that had some potential opportunities to grow. So we ended up in Wisconsin, in Madison, Wisconsin. And of course, me being me, I'm like, why I need to get involved with the AIG community to meet some people here. They didn't have any action in Madison. The chapter was in Milwaukee.

So I just joined up and I volunteered to be the Madison Representative to organize that community and started collaborating with the other design groups that were in town.

Okay. And it was just kind of a small community that we could have stayed in if we wanted. But as I started digging deeper into the niche of sustainable food, I realized we probably need to be going to big trade shows, be in a bigger city, more opportunity, maybe even for more access to potential employees, things like that. So we, again, I think we did pull up the findyourspot.com again. And it was still existed then, but it was maybe getting a little dated and, pulled up a list and it was like Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, like these kind of cities just started popping up.

San Francisco is too expensive. I didn't feel like living in the heat of Texas. So Seattle sounded like the place to go and, you know, we'd always wanted to move to the Northwest anyway. So this was our our shot. So we just decided to pick up and move over to Seattle and landed in downtown and trying to figure out our way from there. And of course, you know, keeping the theme, I immediately went to an AIGA event. And I was on the board within, you know, probably a few weeks of arriving.

Something like that. It was a good one. I just remember walking into I had no idea what to expect because it was my first leadership retreat. And I actually think nobody that went with us had ever been to one before. So we were all just like because remember the chapter restarted basically.

So it was all a bunch of new people to AIGA leadership. So not knowing what to expect and we get there and I remember Carolyn Kelowna, think she was at this one with me, I'm pretty sure. But I remember like we'd not know what we were doing and we'd go up to like a national board member and be like, Hey, is this your first retreat? But do you know Caroline and in This was when I was in Charlotte was the first retreat that I went to. But the experience for me that was weird was walking into this room.

You don't know anybody. You don't know what to expect. You're at the big national retreat. Is it going to be high pressure? Are there going to be clicks?

Is it going to be like you're to embarrass yourself saying the wrong thing or get on stage and say something stupid or whatever? But you basically walk into the room and all of a sudden you're surrounded by 300 of your best friends that you've never met before. And I think it's because a, we're all creatives. So we've got that baseline in common. B, we're all community builders because we jumped in to help build community rather than hoping someone else will build it for us.

And then C, I can't remember if I started A, C or one, two, three. We'll just say C or three, whichever one that was.

I got to nine, so I know there's one missing. Because I remember when I left my the last retreat, I'm pretty sure on stage I was saying that it was it was my tenth retreat. So there must be one I'm missing in there somewhere.

I was executive sustainability director in Seattle before I became president. I was operations director in Charlotte and was next in line to be president, but I moved. So I didn't take that role. In Wisconsin, I was programming director because I was building out the Madison area. And then I've also done some national task force leadership roles of living principles, which is the sustainable design kind of framework or the start of it.

And then the design for good task force and the all of a sudden I'm spacing on the third one is emerge. Does that sound right? It's the bridging the kind of the student experience to the professional experience group. But that was more led by Jenny Price and some others. But I participated in a couple different sessions where they brought a bunch of AIGA leaders together into one place and we brainstormed what it could be and built out the program.

I don't know if there is an active task force right now, but I still kind of help chapters with past impact related programming. And then as mentioned earlier, trying to work with a working with a small group of people to try to get AIGA Seattle back up and running because the pandemic kind of squashed the chapter.

Or whatever else it is? So you build this national network, which is really powerful. And then I think just learning from others, like you go to these retreats of course to learn or teach others. And I think in both cases you learn, right? If you're teaching others, you learn more about what you have to teach and you learn, you know, what people are getting or not getting about it.

Or if you're in their session and learning from them, you get to learn something that maybe you'd never otherwise get to experience because in your job or in your role, or whether it's in the chapter or your professional job, you may never get to touch that kind of work that they get to do because they're in a different space of design or a different level of design or something like that. Getting to hear how other people practice the profession and learn some of their tools and frameworks and methodologies was always super inspirational for me. So I guess those are the two main things that I loved. And then just as a city and culture person, loved the retreat always rotating. I got to experience cities and local cultures that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten to experience.

Like, that's always fun. Just check out the city a little bit before all the, work starts. And then during the retreat, you know, there's little moments where there's a break in programming or a lunch where you don't have something to do and you just casually form a group of people that you happen to bump into at a session or as you're walking down the street heading somewhere and you just make new connections and have some fun conversations totally unprompted, unscripted, just connecting with other great people that happen to be there. And then, after the retreat, one of my favorite things was, like, the 5AM club. It was not official part of the programming, but part of the culture.

Or maybe it was 6AM club. But, the way I understood it started is because former executive director Rick Gruffey would always, have a flight the next morning. Like, the retreat would end, like, let's say, Saturday night. He would fly out Sunday morning at, like, 5AM or or leave to the airport at that time. So there would always be a group of people Saturday night that instead of going to bed after the after party, they would just hang out, go grab breakfast, and then come and hang out in the lobby so we could say goodbye to Rick.

Really? And try to scare him a little bit, you know, like, really? Yeah. So it eventually became more and more organized. People knew about it, and there would even be, like, Francis Yolanda kinda designed some shirts for for the club and stuff.

So it became this, like, known thing that if you knew about it, you were probably gonna participate in it. But and then for those who maybe didn't know about that, there was sometimes kind of an organic brunch that would get assembled that next day too, which was always kind of a nice nice way to, like, shake off the hangover or something like that from all the parties and just go, I guess, say goodbye in a little bit more peaceful environment, calm everybody's just kinda re trying to rejuvenate and hang out for a little bit before you head to the airport.

I've gotta speak at seven in the morning. I would still do the party till two or three in the morning and then speak at seven in the morning and then just be exhausted that whole day and kinda keep the loop going. As I'm getting older, that's harder to do. But when I was in my twenties, it was easier to keep rolling off the momentum. But part of the reason I do that is because those unexpected connections Right.

Sometimes are the best connections. Like, you could try to have a great conversation with someone in the middle of an education session or something, but it's the time afterwards where you get to connect as humans where you really kind of build that bond and make lifelong friends. So I think that's part of my FOMO is that I don't want to miss those opportunities to create connections, and then I wear myself out. So like after leadership retreats or big trade shows or something like that, I'm I just always feel so drained for a few days afterwards because I just leave it all, like on the table, to speak. I just burn all the energy to try to do as much as I can and connect with as many people as I can.

A lot of them I might not get to see again for a year or two years or something like that.

So I'd say a lot of the work I do has been influenced by all the people I've connected with and relationships I've made and things I've learned. As far as connections that led to a specific paid gig from someone, I'd say probably fewer on that because I've been self employed for most of my career. And my clients usually aren't designers. They're usually marketing directors or CEOs or founders, sustainability directors, etcetera. So

Don't quote me on that because I can't remember who it was. But I came in as it was fizzling. There was no more money, and we were trying to figure out how to kinda make this stick around and continue it. So that was kind of my job is to go to retreats or other things and teach this and and keep it going. But what I found is every time I did that, started with not having a clue of what this is, and they would kind of approach the framework, and their eyes would gloss over and they're like, well, how do I do this?

Where do I start? So it was a very academic approach. It was like, read read these 500 articles and look at this framework and then figure it out for yourself. It was very theoretical, not very practical. So when I taught it at leadership retreats or other events, I would always make it practical.

I'd pull out a physical example and I'd have a dialogue around that product. And I would say, you know, talk about this paper. What could we be asking? What questions could we be asking about this paper to make it more sustainable? And it would just make it more tangible for people.

So one thing I learned there was we need to make this easier for people interact with, less theoretical, more practical, something more familiar to them. And then the Design for Good group, I know one of their struggles, I wasn't on the team at the time, but I would observe this through leadership retreats or presidents calls or something. A lot of the events were programmed around what I would describe as designers doing good, aka we would host an event and ask people to bring canned food that we would donate. We didn't use the power of design to do that. We just used the power of being good people and we happen to be hosting an event.

Mhmm. So let's do something good around it. Whereas there were some good examples where people were using design and an inclusive process to, like, bring the community together and design solutions for their problems in the community. Was like, that seems more designed for good. Yet often they forget the sustainability side of things.

They do good work for good causes, but it's unsustainable solutions. Whereas maybe sustainability people might be doing sustainable things for companies that aren't doing great for the things for the world. So myself and some others just started asking questions of why are these two things separate? Why don't we pull them together? And you know what?

While we're at it, why is this diversity inclusion separate from this too? We need everyone at the table if we're gonna design holistic solutions that are better for everybody. So I think it was before one of the retreats. To remember which one, maybe New York or oh, that's probably the other one. No, wait, not New York.

Anyway, one of the I'm I'm remembering a retreat planning session in New York, but maybe it was Baltimore or something, but we had we organized a a summit before the retreat with those groups, the Design for Good team, the Diversity and Inclusion team, the Living Principles team, and just some other movers and shakers we thought would add 2¢ into this. And we did a whole facilitated session on how do we merge these things, what's missing, how do we make them better, how do we make them work together. And ultimately what came out of that is we realized that we could weave them all together and maybe create something like a process or a workbook or something like that that would kind of help people do all of them at at the same time, but in a clear process that felt familiar to most designers. And that eventually evolved into what we now call the path to impact, which we created, turned into a workbook that includes inclusive, strategies and methodologies for designing sustainable measurable impact. So it weaves all the prompts and kind of process suggestions and design thinking frameworks, etcetera, into one workbook that we then went and got some grant money from SAPI.

We applied to the SAPI Ideas That Matter grant, Applied for that grant, won a grant to produce all the books and distribute them to whichever chapter signed up. I think we got 30 chapters to sign up to take on the books and organize workshops. Then the pandemic hit And people weren't organizing workshops, and a lot of the people who we shipped the books to rolled off the board, and then the board lost the books, it kind of slowed up. So we were like right in the process of taking off with that process. I wanna say we probably did like fifteen, twenty events or something like that, and then we were got stalled.

So I've done a few since then, and I still do some virtually. Last one I did was out in the Dallas Fort Worth chapter in person. So lost a little momentum in there, but the team that I was working on that with with Laurel, Justin, Leticia, and Lenny, we all just kind of mushed all of our brains together, you know, along with the other people that were in the group like Antonette, Carol, and and, Tim and stuff that we kind of pulled all of our brains together and just figured out, like, what what would a framework look like and how do we make this easy and familiar? So we designed it in into a familiar process, like a design process of starting from here. Brought some books just in case we needed to.

We started with the kind of envisioning, then planning, then implementing, then measuring, and then storytelling. So depending on which phase of the process you're in, can just start there or you can go through the whole process and it's got a series of prompts and stuff. This was like starting point A. We envisioned lots of different tools and frameworks and videos. We created a handful of workshops and we handed those off to the chapters to just kind of create your own workshops, with the books.

Like, that's a very tangible example of without this group of people and without those circumstances and knowing all these people and knowing kind of problems we all kind of saw in the industry, this thing wouldn't exist and we wouldn't have all done this work together. And I use this thinking or pieces of this process or whatever in a lot of my work still today. And I still kind of bring these books out to b corp events or whatever else I'm doing and just try to promote the methodology. So I could probably come up with a bunch of examples like that, but that's one tangible way that connections and people have kind of changed the trajectory of my career, I guess.

And just being in that collaborative space with all those awesome leaders and getting to think about how to bring a city to life and an experience to life was a lot of fun and rewarding, of course. One experience with the Baltimore team is we came up with a whole leadership framework specifically around the leadership retreat of things that we felt like a good design leader needs to know. And we tried to create a whole structure and framework and tracks based on that leadership framework so we can make sure we're checking all the boxes of different skills that you, might need to be a good design leader so people could level up from just being a designer to a design leader, design manager to whatever, wherever they wanted to go in their career. Created a whole playbook around that. So that that was like a fun side project of the leadership retreat, you know?

And then so that's fun, just planning the retreat and then going to the city and trying to figure out how you're gonna kinda organize this, see the space, try to figure out what rooms you could use for different things or what restaurants you might tell people to go to for lunch sessions or what venues to use for after parties or different things like that. So that experience of learning the city a little bit more was really fun. Like Baltimore in particular, I ended up going to Baltimore like so many times, not just for AIGA, but I had other things that happened to be in the city at the time. So I just got to learn Baltimore more than I ever would have otherwise. And then it's fun for me to get up on stage and just goof around with my friends too to some degree.

Like, for example, like Dallas getting to get up on stage with Jenny Price for their little hobby horses and we bought some cowboy hats and hobby horses and we'd like make a whole skid out of it like bouncing around on the stage like we're riding our horses. So it's just a fun experience to just get up there and celebrate community and leadership and try to create something that will be of value to other attendees. So I would recommend it five out of five stars. If you get a chance to be president's council chair and organize some retreats, definitely do it. A lot of work, but a lot of fun.

And we would focus a series of events around that topic where we would, find nonprofits or organizations focused on that problem. And then we would put up a call for creatives to participate in the project. And we would get, I think, hundreds of applications of creatives who wanted to participate in these, projects. And then we would do some match match matchmaking to, build team creative teams for each of the nonprofits based on the problem they're trying to solve. And then run them through kind of a program and helping them learn how to work together.

And then they would set some scopes and do some work. And then there would be check ins and share outs at the end, like a whole showcase. And that whole program was designed around community needs to Stacy's point. We we just picked the problem. We didn't even define the problem.

We let the nonprofits define the problem for the creative teams. Right? So it was more of a way to facilitate the connection between creatives and nonprofit problem solvers to come together and find creative solutions to their problems. Lots of different teams doing lots of great work for the community. And in fact, I would bump into people who I didn't know.

They didn't even know I was involved in AIG, and they'd mention, Oh, yeah. We're part of this changemaker program. I'd be like, Really? That's amazing. That's cool. They're like, Wait. You're the president? That's so cool. I didn't even know you were involved in that. We got so much out of this program.

You know, there would be conversations like that that would bubble up from the community, right? So I think that was a powerful program that we were getting ready to, I think, scale and package up and make available to other chapters. I think we'd started spreading it maybe another chapter or two, started taking some of those things on. But that whole thing started kind of from the seed of an event where my, kind of sustainable design task force just decided to host workshops.

Whereas design philanthropy or designers doing good was donating time, attention, skills or money to a cause. So there is a mix of both of those obviously happening with change makers. When you don't just donate 10% of the ticket sales to this company, but you literally design the whole program and experience of whatever you're offering to make an impact, that's the true power of design with a capital d, I think, at that point. So I think there's lots of power and potential in the AIGA community. Like, the community is just so full of passionate, super intelligent, creative, people who wanna make a difference.

And I think these are examples of the types of programs that come out of these communities when you just let designers do what they want to do.

So I don't feel like I had to create super hard guardrails most of the time. I would just maybe plant some seeds and then the group would water them or or they'd bring their own plants or they'd decide let's build the garden over here instead. So I think it was just creating space for these things to happen. I think maybe it's my skill set, just bringing people together and inviting them to do what they're called to do.

Even if it's just, let's gather 10 people at a coffee shop or at a bar for a social or something like that, and then build from there. So we've even before the chapter's reestablished, we've just been having little social gatherings to remind people that there is a design community here. We just don't have a current label or a website that's working. And then once you start there, you just start inviting people in and tapping into their energy and excitement, giving them something to do. Then you start getting to the point where you can set a bigger ambitious goal and start doing more.

And then you need to start delegating and creating more structure because you're going to need more team and more process and more everything like that. And then, you know, create leadership positions amongst the people on there so that you're not bottlenecking anything. That's one of the challenges I see a lot of community builders or designers. What happens to a lot of the newer leaders is they don't feel comfortable delegating and then they try to do everything themselves and then they burn out their committees because there's nothing meaningful for the committee members to do and then they end up burning out because they're doing all the work and like carrying the committee. So like bring people on, empower them, let them do the stuff they came on to do and then eventually you need to take a step back like Eric was saying like let them do it, let them own it because if they own it, if they love it, if it's their baby, they'll keep doing it.

But then encourage them to do the same. Don't bottleneck yourself. Don't hold leadership power over our positions when you could open that up and let someone else take a leadership role. So I think it's just about, you know, start small and let it grow from there without forcing it into anything and then just see where the community grows itself from there to some degree.

Pretty sure we even had, like, the guy that worked at the hot dog stand in Chicago. I don't know. Something like that. Take take a photo of us doing pyramids. We were doing them in, the ping pong bar in Colorado and got kicked out of the bar because we were being too dangerous.

They were in hotel lobbies, in parks, you know, in the streets, hotel rooms, in hallways, anywhere you can squeeze in a pyramid. Even when we walked into this room, was looking around like, Is there space for a pyramid? But it's a dangerous activity. You know, make sure you've got your health insurance and everybody's prepared. You've got like a Brendan Shanley there who will direct everybody and make sure everyone knows their roles and how they need to lock their arms and how many people per tier and and how which order you need to build it in and who needs it to be on the top.

You got you gotta have a real builder there

Looking forward to it. But I'm excited to get it back up and running. And almost everyone I talked to that's been involved in AIGA just all says, well, let me know how I can help once it's up and running. So I think everyone wants it to exist again. We just need to