Christian Solorzano [00:01]

Hello, you're listening to Underscore, a show by the Chicago Graphic Design Club. I am your host, Christian Solorzano, and today I share my conversation with Jo-Nell Sieren, photographer, designer, educator, and founding director of Agency Columbia at Columbia College in Chicago.

Jo-Nell studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she learned, as she puts it, how to see, how light and dark fall on the subject, how to compose, how to pay attention, how to listen, and that sensibility followed her into design, into the classroom, and into 15 years at Columbia College Chicago, where she built Frank Magazine and eventually Agency Columbia, a student studio that put real clients in front of real students with real deadlines.

In this conversation, we talk about what it takes to build confidence in students who doesn't believe in their work yet. Why she believes her network is just as important as her portfolio, and what a cohort of her students commuting hours, working multiple jobs, caring for siblings and children taught her about resilience and showing up. We also spent time talking about why watercolor and why painting with her 11-year-old daughter is one of her favorite ways to turn her brain off.

As always, if you enjoy conversations like these, I really appreciate your support. When you leave us a rating wherever you listen. Thank you and enjoy the conversation. Welcome to our show.

Jo-Nell Sieren [01:36]

Thanks so much for having me.

Christian Solorzano [01:38]

So we're recording this on a Friday, June 26th, and I can see in your space that it probably looks very gray outside as it does here in Oak Park. Yeah. How, what do you, are you doing anything this upcoming week for 4th of July?

Jo-Nell Sieren [01:56]

Yes. So I do have to work a bit in the earlier part of the week, but we have vacation time. My daughter doesn't have any camps, so we're gonna be in Door County, Wisconsin with family just for the week. That's generally what we do this time of year. Cool.

Christian Solorzano [02:12]

And what are your favorite ways or your, how do you typically, cuz you're, I'm assuming you have probably a very demanding schedule with between teaching and also Being a parent to an 11-year-old, how do you tend to practice? What do you do to decompress or to turn your mind off from your responsibilities as an adult?

Jo-Nell Sieren [02:33]

Oh, that's a great question. Yeah, honestly, I do Orangetheory Fitness. I'm a big fan of that and the whole interface and Orange Zone and all that. So I've been doing that for 3 years and I do watercolor. So I'm not good at it by any means. I don't mean to say that, but I do enjoy that type of work, like just doing something very non-digital, if you will, creating that. And I do that a lot with my daughter Ava, who's quite a good artist.

She's 11 and she sits with me a lot and we will do that or we will, it could be anything from a still life to characters or whatever. But I do enjoy that and I enjoy that right now.

Christian Solorzano [03:13]

And is there a subject matter that you enjoy painting?

Jo-Nell Sieren [03:18]

So actually, Mary Foyder, who I know has been on the podcast before, she's a very good friend. She turned me on to these wonderful watercolors from San Francisco by a company called Case for Making. I'm a big fan of their, not only their watercolors, cuz they're heavily pigmented. And I tend to like to layer and do what you are not supposed to do with watercolor, which is essentially try to make them like oil and overdo it on the shadows and things.

But I, but Ava and I, my daughter, have, we've taken some classes that are online through Case for Making. And we will often do, we did a great one on Wayne Thiebaud about cakes. And so oftentimes I feel like we're drawing or we're painting food or fruit or things like that.

Christian Solorzano [04:02]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely, sometimes I look at old paintings and it's like a still life, like a cornucopia. And there's some, there's something so beautiful about just things in their elements existing. And it's like, here's just apples.

Jo-Nell Sieren [04:22]

Yes. Yes. No, really. I'm into that for sure.

And it is a nice contrast for a lot of the other ways that I feel like I have to think within my life. So I enjoy that quite a bit. I was in Denver the week before last for a conference and I was painting. I was trying to simplify the shapes of mountains as much as possible. So I had little sketchbooks full of that because it was an intense conference. All those things can be all day, lots of being on with people.

And so just sit in the hotel and just paint. Again, I don't do this well at all. I don't claim to do it well. I don't think it's important if I do it well or not, but I do enjoy it.

Christian Solorzano [05:02]

Yeah. Before, I was talking with someone earlier today and we were discussing how we measure success or what qualifies as good. And I was mentioning how sometimes Success basically could be whether you felt good doing it or not. And I think that's important.

Jo-Nell Sieren [05:20]

Yeah, 100%. Yep.

Christian Solorzano [05:22]

Yeah. So your background is in photography. That's what you studied, right? And then that took you to UX, user experience design, which is what you mostly focus on today. And to me, even though photography and UX might seem like they're worlds apart, they both deal with the human experience. And the realities of life. And I wanna know how that shift from photography to UX came to be.

Jo-Nell Sieren [05:55]

Oh, that. Okay. So there's a few facets of my life. So it's not even just solely UX right now. I'm at Northwestern, is all about industry strategies and all about working with external kind of companies, employers or whatnot that wanna hire engineering and design students and that comes in a variety of ways, but I'll kind of get to that in just a second.

I would say early on for me, like I didn't grow up with a lot of examples of what an artist career would look like. Like I can't really, I can't point to that as like a kid, but I, there were some pivotal moments for sure where I, where I liked to draw and I particularly liked to pay attention to where light and dark would fall on something. And I like, would happen through shading.

Now, there was a— my parents sent me to a high school that was not the local high school, and part of that was because it had a really great art program. That's actually where, in high school, is where I met David. So we were in high school together in the same art program. His aunt is actually— so Pat Frederick is actually my art teacher.

It was an amazing program, and honestly, it was teachers like that who there were a couple of things that I would say of note that teachers in high school highlighted or sent me on a path for. And I would say the first one is that they, Pat and Kathy Burnett, another teacher, they taught us how to see things differently, how to see mapping in objects, how light and dark falls, right?

But then also taught us how to play the game of how to go to art school, how to prepare portfolios, how to talk about your work, present it. And without any of that, I wouldn't have applied to all the different art schools I did, and I wouldn't have ended up in SVA in New York. York studying photography. So, well, during my time like studying in school, I was not so interested in commercial photography work, to be totally honest.

And I've spent more time doing documentary work on family members, dramatic lighting, things that appeal to me again with that light and dark. I particularly like black and white. And so that's what I was doing. And at the same time, I would take classes within design. Those were electives for me. First job was to work at an art gallery in New York and they had me creating promotional things like designing work, like marrying photography and design together 'cause it was a photography gallery.

And those were the building blocks that kind of set me off on a lot of things. By the time I graduated from college, it was living in New York. My last year was started off the semester or the school year was September 11th. It's a big, like it's a big blow to be a young creative about to graduate and in an environment like that with all of that going on. So really it did turn me towards leaving New York too, not trying to stay.

And my first job out of school back in Wisconsin was to teach kids how to draw for afterschool art programs. I did that through park and rec departments, afterschool programs, camps in the summer, and I did that for a number of years. I would actually— so it was kids, toddlers all the way through high school. And then I also did some adult drawing classes at the library too that I would teach.

That's where this sort of interest in teaching came about really was just opportunity after I graduated and a certain, a certain amount of skills in maybe drawing, painting, and then photography. I would teach photography as well. But at the same time, anything that I've ever done interactively in web, for the most part, up until doing a master's degree, I had learned all on my own. So all—

If you remember Classroom in a Book from Adobe, or even as there was more like Skillshare when that came out, those really, it was just being able to adapt and teach skills to further what I wanted to do. That relationship to UX really comes down to how I was simultaneously teaching. So my first— so I worked for Columbia College Chicago for 15 years, and I've been just about everything you could be there.

I was an admin staff who was hired to make, to design all of the promotion materials for the photo department. This was everything. It was a lot of publication too. Could be artist publications. It was publications for catalogs for the, for exhibitions, for different events and initiatives we did, running the social media, the website, things on that order.

And during that time, I got the opportunity to teach a web class at Columbia as an adjunct, but that class was primarily taken by photographers who really didn't want anything to do with HTML and CSS. And it was a hard class for them. And my approach really was, Okay, this group of students just sees things differently. How can I communicate the complexities of this to them? How can I teach them to see it differently? And I would start to adapt things.

I would have them doing a box model and pages of a hamburger to explain how the divs stacked and their relationship to CSS was together.

To break down how it actually visually comes together. And I would start to make it more approachable. And honestly, that's the way, that was the way in to user experience to me. I didn't exactly know that's what it was called, but I found that in many different ways in my career, I've just tried to take in research information, identify a problem for an audience, and try to communicate it as effectively as possible.

Christian Solorzano [11:25]

Yeah. And with someone that went to art school in a relatively young age, what were some of your, what were some of the things that you spent most time thinking about or even Taking that class where you were being trained on how to see, what was your eye naturally drawn to?

Jo-Nell Sieren [11:42]

I think when you, I think other people might relate to this, but if you've had that, if you've had that special teacher breaks through and actually like you, when once you see it the way that they're trying to instruct you can't unsee it. The way that I can view the world, the way that I can see beautiful light so quickly, right? Like in a scene or compose something in my mind like that really does come From learning that, and that's way back to high school, honestly.

That's everything to me.

That approach and how I applied it just to when I want to make a photograph, all the way down to trying to explain to a student who is struggling to find a job as a designer how to use sort of a design process to research and understand the studios and companies that are out there and look at what, how their storytelling is so that they can frame their storytelling, whether that's in the interview or just the portfolio, how they talk about and walk through their work.

There takes a lot of effort and it's hard to see at first. Sometimes it, when I was first certainly advising different majors within design or illustration or game or whatnot, they just needed to take a step to really understand the landscape of what was expected and how to communicate that they could do that. Right? And something I'd run into a lot is just final glossy mock— mocks with no process or examples of how we got there or the thinking that's in there.

And that's just jumping to now, that's especially hard right now. AI has flattened so much of what happens in applications. This is part of the problem with the market, with the job market too, especially for entry level. All these resumes look exactly the same. Because they're all perfect because AI's created them to be perfect. So you're trying to find ways to differentiate yourself and tell stories about the work you do and make the impact. Yeah.

And so I apply these same methods to all of it, like just seeing it in a new way. It's iterative in many ways.

Christian Solorzano [13:49]

Yeah. And I can see some of that, those like for the photos that you post on your Instagram, they're always very intentionally composed and there's always very dramatic light. And I can see some of that creative sensitivity come across through the things that you tend to post. Which I think, I know, it's always, I always love when I see designers do photography because sometimes to me their photography kind of shares me, shares with me a little bit of their inner world.

It's, it feels almost like you're looking at, I don't know, a raw piece of them, in my opinion.

Jo-Nell Sieren [14:34]

I mean, that's been pretty, the style that I gravitate towards, the things that get me excited and can be really moving and that I covet, books that I'll buy by photographers usually have, there's an emotional element to it that I respond to really well. And yeah, I think I don't do, I don't make photographs really. And even I don't really make them and put them anywhere. You know what I mean? It's just turned into my little archive of images and things like that.

But every once in a while there'll be something that I'll, that I might be included in or that I could highlight. But for the most part, I just feel like I'm the only one who sees them, right?

Christian Solorzano [15:14]

Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. So you were at Columbia College and you're no longer there. While you were there, you did something that I would have— people would talk about and they would be like, you gotta hear about this thing that's happening at Columbia. And that was Agency Columbia.

And to me, I don't know too much about it other than what I read online and what other people have told me, but it's quite often that I also teach and I have some students that I'm like, man, it would be so cool to get these awesome students and put 'em in a room together and have them work on real client projects and have them have expectations, have them have deadlines, and have them actually learn and execute.

So can you talk a little bit about what that, like what inspired that and everything about it?

Jo-Nell Sieren [16:10]

Yeah, I guess it was. So there, I'll first start just by identifying a class that I wrote when I was an adjunct called Frank Magazine. That's really where the start of this was. So around 20— I guess it was 2012, 2013, somewhere in there, while working in the photography department.

And I was working again in the more admin support sort of role with some amazing faculty and staff, really Wonderful colleagues, supportive chair, who we were identifying that it was harder and harder to find ways to like view student work, honestly, that just became down to individual portfolios. And there wasn't like a collective way to say, here's students that are building different work and not just in photography, also in design and journalism and whatnot.

And so the idea came from, could we have a publication completely digital that would bring together different majors and let them lead the story development and go through the process of building sort of a kind of a custom digital experience, and this is at the time when some of that was really new too, to be honest. Like there wasn't as much as there is now. I'm even thinking of New York Times and their digital features where you could find them all.

I believe they were called specials at the time, and you could see the kind of content that they would curate and how they would actually be able to build a story and how the interactive was part of that story. The way that you would go through. The pieces. And that's, that was what the start of it was. But I really, because academia can be so siloed, I really had to find good collaborators at the school to make that work.

And this is something I always come back to too. And I just was telling my daughter this morning that you have to find the helpers, just like Mr. Rogers said. I feel like throughout my career, throughout my time, I always tried to find the helpers. And I just like align with those people, the doers.

Because it was hard to get something like this to go and to get all different types of parts of the school on board because there you have your departments, you're fragmented, and there's trying to be able to do that was tricky, but it happened.

And I would have a team of anywhere from 9 to 14 that would come together each year where I would lead them through a process of what are the pitches, what are the stories, how could these stories be interactive, what elements would add to them, what can we build that would make this be interesting? What kind of assets do we need to create?

And it started with Adobe's digital publishing software had allowed you to be able to create things for like specifically for the iPad or the, or iOS or the iPhone, and you could send it off to the App Store and they'd be individual apps to create. And at the time we had a license for that and a, and then I had a developer license through Columbia.

And so we were able to launch issues just to the App Store, which just meant only people downloading that app could read our magazine. But they would get that digital publication experience and we'd go through the process. And around that time, I was also teaching publication design at Columbia, which was heavily print. But I started to work in like, how could we do the same content in a different way? What other ways could we— what other assets could we use or need to make this?

Could sound be included? Could there be a video component? What could happen to the type? Could it change or Manipulate or something. And I ran Frank Magazine, ran for 13 issues, and we did the iPad version up until issue 6. I think starting with issue 7, it was 100% web-based after that. These could be anything from custom builds that were really intricate and crazy. I think one of the issues is still available that way.

Some of the other ones, depending on the kind of team I had, and if I had students who wanted to do any kind of programming or builds like that, then we would, if I didn't have that, we might do really customized Squarespace and try to build out of that. One case too, parts of it were just Figma prototypes, because you could link to them and it worked, but it was scrappy and amazing, honestly. So 13 issues like that with amazing partners.

So the, one of the reasons why it really worked is there's professor in journalism, Sieren Lloyd Peshkin, who back in 2013 was like, I will help you do this. And because I was full-time working and then just teaching at night, she would sometimes come to the evening classes and work with the students on fact-checking and things for the sort of journalism process there, which is amazing.

Again, it's why that kind of took off and it also helped bring in popularity for students who wanted to be a part of an experience like that. It's my interest in team development too, and how different creatives of different disciplines work together. Which can sometimes go just really well and sometimes can have hiccups that you have to foster within that. After 13 teams like that, I really learned a lot of like how they would work together.

Because of one of the Frank issues, there was a, there was another faculty member who had a project from an external organization called CPS Lives, and they brought it to me saying, could you do what you do with Frank, but you, could you do it on a project? Level. And this professor is Jay Wolke from photography. And I thought, yes, but I don't know that we could do this for academic credit.

I feel like it would be best if they were interns, if they could be paid to do this project. Also, this particular project was a full custom build site, including the research, the design, the development. It was not going to work within a semester. It needed to be something different. It needed to work beyond academic constraints of the academic calendar. And I remember putting a pitch together for how I think it should be done, including the budget of roughly $40K, I think it was.

And it was like, students have to be paid. We're going to need these sorts of resources to build it. I went through the timeline, never thinking that anybody would approve it ever. I remember the day that I gave the presentation saying to a colleague, I'm going to go and do this, but I don't think it'll go anywhere or something to that effect. And it got greenlit in the meeting. And that experience took, I think, 10 months to do from start to finish.

And it was investing in the students and their creative work to create. It was all the way from what should this very interactive site that has to tell lots of stories about how artists go into Chicago Public Schools and work with students in different ways. Sometimes that's through documenting and telling the story of that. And sometimes there's actual work that's created that the artists are doing and the students are doing. So there's there were just different ways to understand the storytelling.

Then you had to be able to sort by zip code, by school. We needed an interactive map and we needed to be able to update that interactive map very easily. So again, finding sort of the helpers at Columbia to make this work was what set it off because I was able to find sort of the students with faculty partners and we ran this thing for 10 months. It's a great site, still used today. And the students were all paid for the experience.

And that was one of the first times where— that was around 2018, I believe. That was one of the first times where I thought, there's something to the way that this has been done. It was also around that time that I wanted to get a master's degree because I just had a BFA at that point. And I went for a master's in UX/UI. And I was focusing heavily on interface design and prototyping.

And in the second year, I switched a bit to service design and really focusing on like, how do you design a studio that lives inside of academia? And I want it to be more than just, oh, it would be great if students could work on this project for a company. I really had to think about it in terms of all those questions.

The students that do the work, the mentors, the professional staff around it, who those industry partners and clients are, who the community collaborators might be, how prospective students would view this, how it's— how those case studies are shared. What about how students are paid through student employment, right? How does that work exactly? How does internship credit work where it's applied? The finance, the hiring system, the onboarding. In my model that ended up being the thesis work of my master's degree was all about this.

And in my model, I was like, we need more opportunities, more experiential learning opportunities in the school, like available to students. Some of the models that I looked at where this was done at other schools, they would have a studio where they would hire on maybe 6 students and those students would stay potentially for 2 years, the same students working on a variety of projects. I can understand the appeal to that. You onboard and you allow for like growth and change.

They work on different things all the time. But I wanted to provide as many projects and opportunities as possible. So the model that I went with was there would be a very meticulous onboarding process. You'd be onboarded to a project and the client, and you'd have your timeline. And when the project was done, the work was done and the time in the agency was done. And so it could be a 3-week project and it could be a 6-month project.

It was able to run off of an academic timeline. Student employment, how things, how students are hired and what they're able to do for hours during the year and hours during the summer. That's all part of it as well. And then it's how projects are pitched, how the budget is created, proposals for different companies. So those were the pieces that I was looking at on the service design side as well.

Just how all of these different factors and stakeholders work together, but around Gosh, I think after I had done CPS Lives, I did try to pitch right before the pandemic an idea of a studio. And I had some advocates that were chairs from different departments. I had the chair of fashion, the chair of photo, the chair of design, and the chair of interactive arts and e-media all saying we would get behind this. But it's still— it needed sort of provost blessing to happen.

It needs resources, right? So it took some time. And in that time, I moved into some other positions. So I had been an internship and career advisor for design and photography and interactive arts and fine arts for 5 years. And then I moved into a leadership role running industry relations for Columbia.

And so now it was all majors that I was looking at, which really gave me a good landscape into not just the areas that I was most familiar with, but also our cinema majors, social media marketing, like looking at how those opportunities come for those students. I was in that master's degree working on that service design project, which ended up giving me a lot of assets and materials to tell stories about how I thought this could work specifically at Columbia.

And then knowing all these entities as well as I did about how they could work together again with those advocates it kind of laid stagnant for a little while. There was a proposal that was laying around and I thought, I wondered how this could take off. And then there was a point there where I applied for it and was appointed an assistant professor position. And that was leading the UX/UI program. And with that came the capstone classes where students worked with clients.

And that brought some multiple disciplines together to work on different projects. And because of my kind of background working with industry and industry partners, my first client that I brought in for the students was NASCAR. And so the NASCAR Chicago street race. So I had a class of 20 that was made up of graphic design, UX/UI design. I had illustration and game art, and I had computer programming in there as well.

And the students pitched to the NASCAR Chicago team that they could make they wanted to make 3 things for them. They wanted to create interactive games to do between races. So one of them was a timed reaction game to see if you're faster than a driver to scream. One of them was trivia, and the other one was a, it was a publication. So it was a kind of coloring activity book that was given at the kids zone. So 60,000 of those were printed.

And the team divided up in 3 teams. And in 15 weeks they made all that happen.

Crazy semester. And to lead 3 kind of things like that happening, but every one of them was beautiful and polished. They did an exceptional job and it was hard work for sure. But that experience with the client and the sort of publicity that we got with that and the— plus like our whole team was invited to the street race and students got to see the public actually interacting with their work in a way that is rare, especially that kid zone.

Every kid sitting there, the activities were great and they were completely custom by this group. And then the interactive components just, they worked. They were like, they were fun. They were the right, they did the right amount of research and they were the right experience for that type of event. I am so proud. Such amazing students there.

But that Right after the NASCAR thing happened is when somebody in the administration had identified, hey, you wanted to do this agency, let's see what we can do to try to make— take it off. And so that's where it started. And we got it to the point where we had 3 or 4 projects running. There are a lot of factors here that I would have to identify. When you're on a full-time teaching load, you end up with a course release to be able to run projects.

It's an intense, it was tense amount of, intense amount of work to get this off and running. At the same time running projects, also trying to win projects and communicate and do the new business side. Those were things that I was in the midst of, and I still like incredibly proud of how the agency was built initially, and it's still running today to my knowledge. I ended up getting an opportunity at Northwestern that I could not say no to, that I was very excited to have.

And so I had to depart, but I still see that there's iterations of the agency going and it's, again, I think that model is, I think, especially in an art school, I think it's incredibly important. And I would say too, not that I don't think I mentioned this before, but when I was in grad school doing that research, I found most benchmark programs that were doing this in other schools and I interviewed them and I really learned a lot about how they're put together.

It's a really sensitive structure to build and to work for the students. But it does also require resources around developing and building that new business.

Christian Solorzano [31:15]

Yeah, that seems like such a genius idea, and I'm surprised that I haven't seen other institutions, at least design programs in the Chicago area, adopt something like that. Because I do feel like there's something so empowering about just offering students the opportunity to actually get real exposure to real clients in real— there is something so rich about that I, but I just, why does, why isn't that a prerequisite across design programs? I teach at DePaul and there, that doesn't exist, at least to my awareness.

Jo-Nell Sieren [31:55]

There, so I think that there is a lab there. I can't remember what it's called.

Christian Solorzano [32:00]

Oh, there is a lab. There's a, the IRL, the Idea Realization Lab. But there's not really, at least from what I'm exposed to, there's, I have not seen a direct correlation with graphic design students in particular having sort of an outlet for real client projects. So yeah, I might, after, in the future, I might want to get more information because I think this would be a nice kind of model to maybe start introducing.

Jo-Nell Sieren [32:31]

At Columbia, they did provide us an amazing space that wasn't being utilized on campus in the 600 building. And one of the last things that I really got to do at my time there is work with this wonderful student, Naya Morgan, graphic designer.

We looked at that space and tried to make it as inviting and interesting, thinking about how prospective students might come to Columbia and think, oh, maybe I could work in the agency, or really, I wanted to think likely I will work in the agency because I wanted to be enough opportunity for students. And we had to work with facilities to use photo text.

I'm not sure if you're familiar, but it's essentially like a fabric that we can print on, like a fabric-like substance that's very flexible, and you can kind of wallpaper spaces with it. And with this giant printer that we have that's able to create it. And I think it took 47 41-inch in width panels to go around the entire room. And we created the entire thing in Figma.

Christian Solorzano [33:35]

Oh, that's so cool.

Jo-Nell Sieren [33:37]

Because the reason why it worked too is because we were able to export the files from Figma because there are plugins that you can utilize that. But we were able to show what the panels looked like in a mock. And anybody with the view link who was installing or who else, often we were, we trimmed almost every piece. With a, it was like pizza cutter, Rota Trimmer, I think, to do it. But they're huge pieces. They're 9 feet tall in length.

We, this just the student and I were doing this. Naya, amazing student. But we were able to communicate to others what we were doing in terms of the plan because it had these sort of loops that went over panels, which were a nightmare to line up.

But there are pictures on our, I think I have some pictures I can share with you if you're interested. I'm very proud of the whole Figma thing because again, it communicated to those who had no idea they just were like, how do the panels go up? What this was supposed to look like in such an effective way.

Christian Solorzano [34:32]

That's so cool. Yeah, that should be like a Figma case study for them. It's like, this is what we also enable.

Jo-Nell Sieren [34:38]

Yes, it really solved— you can do these things in Illustrator, of course. You can set up those panels, but you can't have them all lined up next to each other on the artboard and then have all these other elements in there and just have somebody follow a link and spin it up.

Christian Solorzano [34:53]

Yeah, that's so cool. So in your experience, what do you find to be the most necessary ingredients that help generate the best out of people, the best collaboration, their best creativity? How do you manifest that, especially with younger peer, younger students, younger people that maybe sometimes lack the confidence to?

Jo-Nell Sieren [35:18]

Oh, that's good. That's a good question. How would I? In a way, how would I advise students?

Christian Solorzano [35:24]

Yeah, what do you find? What have you found in your experience, the things that need to be in place to make sure that everyone feels supported, encouraged, and capable of doing their best work?

Jo-Nell Sieren [35:35]

I think sometimes where people feel, where students in particular feel intimidated by what to do next is just lack of context. They don't know what they don't know. And this kind of goes back to this idea of trying to show them or help them see it. So I think a lot of my, a lot of my method with this was to try as much enthusiasm as possible to say to a student, where do you see yourself? Or where do you want to be?

What could this be for you? And then follow in like that's following a design process, right? I think that's pretty similar. So it's the idea of having the empathy to understand like, where do you fit? Where does this— if it's wanting to be at a particular place or a job, really understanding it and really doing, conducting that research into defining a point of view around it. Because all of the materials you create, all of the things that you're trying to build, that's prototypes, right?

That those are things, those are artifacts that you're creating in response to something. And I apply what you're asking here.

I keep thinking of helping students understand how to get a job and how to get a job doing something they love and how to understand that it is more than just you are hired to do a thing, but you are part of a team and part of a culture and part of a company and what those things mean and how you can get a glimpse of that through research and then a point of view of where you fit in and what your materials might look like.

And then the other thing is it's through demonstration. So it's instructing somebody how to read, how to conduct that research and what that can look like. I will, I don't know if this part answers that question as much, but it just made me think of something I think is incredibly important. And that is like you spend time in school and you're learning skills and you're applying them to your projects and your portfolios.

Even if you have experiential learning and team-based opportunities, project-based things that you're doing, that's all getting built and you're building up again that point of view in your portfolio. And then you'll have a resume and you'll have a cover letter and you'll have a strategy for you're going to apply for different companies. But the thing that I think is really hard that doesn't get talked about enough is you have to also be building those materials, but then also building your relationships.

So almost every job that I've ever had was connected to somebody who knew more about me than just what was on a resume and a paper, right? It could have been a referral. It could have been like just a, oh, highlight, a gentle look at this. Or it could be somebody I know who came back to me. It ended up at Northwestern because Eric Friedman, who oversaw a career center at Columbia while I was working there is working at Northwestern and told me about an opportunity.

I was actually hired as a consultant initially and for some presentation design sort of work. And really, I became aware of an opportunity and then really thought about how that would fit into what I was doing. And I think that relationship building, that work on your network is incredibly important. And I was Even with these students that I'm just getting to know within the engineering design world at Northwestern, I found myself in a similar kind of dialogue with them. You have to get out there.

You have to, you have to attend events like what Chicago Graphic Design Club is putting on and looking at what IXDA or AIGA, you have to be present in your field. There's something else called the Delivery Fellowship for product designers that I've highlighted to students. Go to these events, meet people. Honestly, they end up being your colleagues in the future, and it's your network, it's your community. And it is hard, especially for people who this kind of networking can be really scary to them.

So I feel like it is partly my job to help to bridge that, providing opportunities while they're students to have to build that through these collaborative, cross-disciplined projects that they can do, right? You don't necessarily work in your silo when you go out into the world, right? You work with a lot of different types of people and different types of creatives or just workers, right?

So understanding that, and it takes a bit to get it, but I think I've had many conversations with students where they're like, that absolutely helped because it's true. Work on, you have to build relationships just like you have to build your materials.

Christian Solorzano [39:57]

Yeah, it is difficult though. I remember I had to, when I was younger, I had to I didn't have to force myself, but it was definitely awkward to go to design events by myself where I was the youngest person there and everyone knew they were so advanced and I'm just there with nothing really to share. But I think there, there's something, there's this thing that you have to believe that you're just gonna absorb.

Think you're just there to absorb and take in and just trust that something good will come out of it. Nothing bad can come out of you just showing up. And listening, and I've been trying. I tell my students, and I think they get it, and I find it helpful to share with them that I'm also not a networker. But I like, but I've somehow managed to figure it out somehow.

But it's interesting because I think every I don't know if you share this with your students, but I think there's something to there's something to be said about whatever. Sometimes I think young people get a little bit insecure about. Things, whether it's maybe they don't know something or they might feel a little awkward, but I think leaning into that and owning it kind of can be beneficial sometimes.

Jo-Nell Sieren [41:13]

100%. I also, I really do find that the design can just go so many different ways. And I've had students before that follow a very specific track and they feel like, I'm a designer, I should, I should be Focusing on, maybe it's print, maybe it's, I've gotta make brand guidelines. I've got, I've gotta make these or show evidence of that skill. And you can see that they do not like doing that. But there's other aspects that they do. Trying to encourage that exploration is pretty important.

Christian Solorzano [41:46]

Yeah. And what has teaching taught you about yourself?

Jo-Nell Sieren [41:51]

Adaptability for sure. I iterate everything. And when I like, I was building coursework around digital design, interface design, team-based work, like how to teach students to be on a team. This was actually a big part of my master's program too. It deviated into this sort of leadership and project and design process that I really at first was like, I don't know, I didn't expect this so much, but it has been so useful for me. And it's been just this thing that I get really excited about.

Just like anything else, I iterate and see what works and I try to adapt it. I often, I can be a little bit like, I like to have lectures and slides and things really tight and ready to go, but I've created some flexibility for myself to be able to adapt things based on my audience of students or whatever that could end up being. It could even, I'm working with student organizations right now to plan roundtable events at Northwestern, right?

And it's Thinking about how we can adjust or iterate or change these to make it make more sense for whatever the needs are hiring right now. That has taught me that I am somebody who really embraces change and I don't hold on to a lot of things either. I can easily scrap and go back and rewrite. And I really like that actually. I get excited when I have a chance to take something that I've learned and adapt it. And make it new.

That's one that's taught me for sure.

Christian Solorzano [43:27]

And today, what's with the way the world is today? What do you feel is the most impactful way for design to respond to things? How do you, how have you seen design shift and evolve with the demands that society places upon the world? How do you, how does that, does that make sense?

Jo-Nell Sieren [43:56]

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a tough time now. I mean, outside of education and hiring, it's just a tough time to be around. I guess one thing I will say too is I had many students my last semester teaching at Columbia that were very much impacted by ICE. And at a certain point, it's just, what are we doing here? What, how do we create this incredibly structured, rigid academic experience that begins and ends with grades? How can we make this more flexible?

And that is a little bit about what you're saying. I think that the design's impact or role in the way that it can play right now. Is having creative thinkers that can solve problems and know how to approach and work together to do. And I think, I think I can apply that to so many different things.

But when I think of the climate right now and I think of just like how I've, how I've felt recently in my experiences and watching what's impacting others, that really does come to mind. Yeah. There's a— yeah.

Christian Solorzano [45:05]

And if you can change anything about higher ed or just education and no one can say no to you, what are, what's something that you would get rid of or create or what would you change?

Jo-Nell Sieren [45:23]

That's tough because I don't know that it's, I don't know that it's specifically one thing. I think I really always had this dream of working in higher ed. I never really thought at a certain point that I would be able to be a faculty member, like a full-time faculty member. So that was a big, that was a big deal for me. But I loved being around, especially creative and design schools.

I loved being around the students and the faculty, the colleagues, the colleagues that I had at Columbia and the colleagues that I have at Northwestern. It's just, it's an amazing thing to be around those kinds of minds and be able to play a part in that. But higher ed's going through a lot right now. And I think anybody who's worked in there for a long time, and this is like my 16th year in higher ed, and again, I've been all the things.

I've been adjunct faculty, full-time faculty, admin staff, advising staff, leadership staff. Like there's all different components and a student at the same time in some cases. I think I would change hierarchy. Around for sure. I think that there's some deep legacy in higher ed that can really get— you can get caught up on and can get in the mind and get in the way of innovative thinking.

Christian Solorzano [46:44]

I—

Jo-Nell Sieren [46:44]

The hierarchy of I am this level and so my ideas matter more than others is something I would remove if I could.

Christian Solorzano [46:53]

Nice. Me too. Yeah, there's been so many instances where and just in life, you ask a question and people agree with your idea, but there's some rule in the system where it's like, we need to get it approved, or we don't do it like that. And you're just come on, this is supposed to be a place of creativity and design. How is it that there's an obstacle? And that really bugs me. Yeah.

Jo-Nell Sieren [47:21]

Or it could just be like the person with the idea. Doesn't carry the rank. To have the idea that their ideas aren't— don't mean enough for some reason. That's a harsh reality, but it's very true in action.

Christian Solorzano [47:37]

Yeah. And what are some of the things that your students teach you?

Jo-Nell Sieren [47:41]

Yeah. Resilience. I think it's a good opportunity to say that in any environment you can run into apathy, right? You can run into apathy from colleagues. You can run into apathy from students who are just for whatever, whatever's going on in my life, this, I just can't be invested in this. And in particularly, I had an amazing cohort at Columbia that graduated in the, in like May of 2025 and then December of 2025 as well. There was a group over that.

And these were all, they were a combination of programming, interaction, UX/UI design majors and graphic designers like this group. And they really just showed up for everything. And these were students that had all kinds of things going on, commuting from hours and hours away where they had to stack all of their classes on certain days just to be able to get through school.

They had siblings they had to take care of, or children themselves living far away and doing that, full-time jobs, multiple jobs in many cases, and still showed up, did the work, and were genuinely enthusiastic to be there. And they, without even knowing it, they built this little community for themselves. And they really taught me resilience. And honestly, there's this— they're so prepared, I feel like, for the world. I believe each and every one of them should have the most amazing jobs.

I hope for that, as many of them are still trying to figure out what's going on in the market. But that was an incredibly bright spot of my time full-time teaching was just those who were like, you know what, you are showing up for me, which I really felt like I was doing for them. I'm gonna show up for you. And they were just in it. Yeah.

Christian Solorzano [49:31]

Yeah, there is, I have some students like that as well that stack all their classes in one day and my classes are always in the evening. So they're like, I've been here since 10:00 AM. And I'm like, man, I don't think I could do that. And then also do homework and write papers and it's, we've all been there. I've done it, you've done it. But looking back, I'm like, how did I do that?

Jo-Nell Sieren [49:54]

Yeah, for sure. Even, I think I was just talking to another amazing colleague at Northwestern who just completed the work for their PhD. They have children, they have a full-time job. And they've been at this for multiple years and now writing the sort of dissertation. But it is so much work. It is so much work. Even as I was completing the master's, I had a 5-year-old. I worked full-time. At the same time, I was on the board for AIGA. It was just like so—

There's so much to do. There's so many things. There's so many ways to split yourself up. It can be such a wild time. I didn't have to do much of that as an undergrad though. I was able to go to school. I could focus on school.

I had work, I had Internships and I had jobs, but what I see the students that I've had go through to complete the work and complete the degree and really build beautiful quality work, I know that they're, it's like all of their time is spent trying to keep up with all these different things. It's really hard. It's really hard for students right now. And tuition is so expensive, right?

Kicked up quite a bit. And then, like I said, with Columbia being a commuter school, you'd have those students who would arrive for a 9:00 AM class and stay until their 10:00 PM class was over. And it's just, that's a long day. That's a lot to do. Yeah.

Christian Solorzano [51:18]

So we're almost at time, but I just wanna maybe spend a little time talking about Chicago. And you've been very active in the Chicago design community. You mentioned your involvement with AIGA Chicago. And then also as an educator. But what do you think about Chicago? Obviously you live here, your fam, like you, your child goes to school here and this is the city that you call home.

And you talk about traveling to other places as well, but what about Chicago makes this a special place for you? And yeah.

Jo-Nell Sieren [51:55]

Full disclosure that I live in Evanston.

Christian Solorzano [51:58]

Evanston, yes.

Jo-Nell Sieren [52:00]

But I do feel like it's kind of Southburg. I do. I think it's like, I know people say that about Oak Park too.

Christian Solorzano [52:06]

I live in Oak Park and it's, and people say the same thing about Oak Park.

Jo-Nell Sieren [52:09]

But yet, let's see, been living in Chicago for 22 years. I consider this still here, even though we've, I was there every single day and immersed in the South Loop. Now I have to say, just for the last 6 months living in Evanston and working at Northwestern, it's a whole different world. That commute isn't there. But so I'm in an— I love this city.

I think we have— and one of the things that I would mention too, that I really miss about working at Columbia every day is I miss the South Loop, even its grittiness, even things that I would complain about often.

Like there's a grit to it, but what a beautiful part of the city. And our— we're near the Wabash Arts Corridor with all the murals and things. And a colleague from illustration, Sherri Carlton, had done the giant bunny on the side of the Columbia Building. And there's just all this amazing work there that I loved being around. So I love the city. I lived in the West Loop for 10 years. Very big fan of the sort of the Loop area and living in urban environments.

I was a New Yorker for a while and I love New York City, but there is just something, there's just something so lovely about Chicago and its community and its people. I also think this is an incredibly warm design community, which you yourself are a large part of, and the programming and things that you put on. Yeah. Put on are incredibly impactful.

For me, just even the time with AIGA Chicago and the people that I've met and grown to know, like Kelly Kanaga and Valerie Craig and Mary Foyder— these are still people that I hang out quite a bit. We go on fancy trips together and whatnot. But those were all relationships that were built during my time on the board.

And I was VP of Education, so a lot of the portfolio reviews and education events— we had a portfolio or a toolkit about, what is it, building materials for applications focused on careers in design. But I've learned so much from those people and so much from just the community that there is here within the design world. So it means a lot to me.

And I also think that students that are in art school and in design school and in engineering and design school that are in Chicago have so much available to them. In terms of that community and that it's there to take advantage of and keep.

Christian Solorzano [54:31]

Yeah. So as you look into the future, what are the things that give you the most hope?

Jo-Nell Sieren [54:36]

Most hope. There's so much changing in the tools that we use, in the way that we use them, in the way that work is created. I will go back to something that bothers me, which is because of AI and AI's depiction in photography and even illustration, things are a bit murky there right now. I showed a picture that David— wait, what was it? It was David LaChapelle, a photograph that David LaChapelle took. And my daughter was like, that's AI.

Anything that looks in any way surreal or incredibly tight and professional, anything that has almost looks perfect, she's, that's AI. That's really sad. She looked at an Annie Leibovitz photograph and said the same thing. And I was like, oh wow, we've got a real problem here. These are things that hurt me quite a bit to think that are happening. And we have to figure out a way around this just as a society too. But the way that it's impacting how creatives get work, that's a problem.

I do feel like things are shifting or turning and that our creatives and those in this future generation are adapting and are finding sort of a way forward like every— like we always do. And so that's something that sort of gives me hope is just the way that we're meeting some of these challenges and the things that I'm seeing it, it's a great thing.

Christian Solorzano [56:02]

Yeah. Do you find that your students are very, are they reluctant to use AI or are they all for it?

Jo-Nell Sieren [56:08]

It's a mix. I've gotta say, you, it certainly when it really started, when you started to notice like, oh my God, every assignment that's getting turned in that had maybe was more written assignments.

Everything is, you didn't write this. But that was really hard because you're spending a lot of time giving feedback on the computer's iteration. I find that not, it doesn't, not so much maybe in the creative work or it's becoming more effectively used in some sort of creative work. Some of these tools are aiding in a way that doesn't bother me at all. I think part of it is maybe our job in education right now too is to be able to instruct how to.

Correctly use some of these things, or just, and also understand the implications of utilizing it. And how that is done, because it can be incredibly harmful if you're sampling work and churning that out. I think that is the part that is so concerning to me. My daughter, I would say, is following a line of illustration She loves graphic novels. She loves to draw characters. She is very good in what she creates. And I think about the future of that career path.

And I do hope these things, I hope that there's, I hope that the evolution here is in favor of unique illustrative talent, if you will.

Christian Solorzano [57:35]

Yeah. Yeah. I feel for the most part, I feel pretty hopeful and, or maybe it's just my algorithm telling me that, but Could be. But there is, I don't know, I feel like there is a, there's a strong sense of people appreciating things that have the human hand and that come from the human soul. So I think maybe those things will become more bespoke and more highly appreciated than— I've been screenshotting on my phone every time I run into an AI ad, I screenshot it.

And I've been documenting them. Just, I don't know why. I imagine that maybe in the future it'll be nice to look back at when AI was like doing this kind of stuff. Like when there's, I feel like Will Smith eating spaghetti. I don't know if you've seen this, but that's the benchmark of AI's progression of like how realistic he can appear to be eating spaghetti. And in the beginning it was like he had a bunch of fingers and his face was distorted.

And now you can see his pores and you can see every noodle go into his mouth.

Jo-Nell Sieren [58:41]

Oh my gosh. No, I have to look at this.

Christian Solorzano [58:45]

So it's been interesting to just see how the tools evolve. And I was speaking earlier, had a conversation with someone and we were discussing the same phenomenon of producing things that kind of all relatively look the same. But a lot of that work that it's producing, it's just based off work that we've considered to be successful, where it's like headline will always go here, call to action on the bottom right. And we're trained to follow this formula of how the eye scans something.

And I hope that the good that comes out of AI is that it makes us question why do we need a subhead, for instance.

Jo-Nell Sieren [59:30]

Yeah, no, that's an incredible point. Yeah. And also when everything starts to look the same and somebody makes it different, then all of a sudden things shift, right?

Christian Solorzano [59:41]

Yeah.

Jo-Nell Sieren [59:42]

Oh, I actually was seeing something new here. My eye's working a little harder to understand this and I like that. And that can be effective too.

Christian Solorzano [59:51]

Yeah. It's almost like we're racing with AI. And it catches up to us and then we gotta go a different path. Yeah. So.

For sure. Beautiful. I wanna say this conversation flew by. I can't believe it's already been an hour, but I wanna thank you so much again for taking the time to chat with us. And I definitely do want to maybe in the future learn a little bit more about this agency academia model, because I think that there's something there. That could be really valuable for emerging designers to be a part of.

Jo-Nell Sieren [60:28]

Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me. I really appreciated the conversation. Thank you.