Christian Solorzano [00:03]

Hello, you are listening to Underscore, a podcast by the Chicago Graphic Design Club. I am your host, Christian Solorzano. On today's conversation, I speak with the community organizer, educator, and designer Amira Hegazy, and we cover a lot of ground. We talk about something that I don't really gets talked about much within our profession, and that's the idea of love and care as guiding principles that can shape and drive the work that we do as designers.

Amira shares details about her ongoing research about Chicago's neighborhoods and the typography that represents the their identity. And we hear about why research is crucial within the design process, and this translates to deep listening and co-designing and ensuring that the work that we're doing is being represented in a way that honors and respects history and cultures.

She also takes us behind the scenes of some of the classes that she teaches and the conversations that she has with her students about ethics and the impact of design across a variety of contexts. I really enjoyed this conversation because I think it encourages us to be really mindful and present within the work that we're all doing. So I hope you find it inspirational, and I hope that you I think so too, and that you take something positive from this conversation. Enjoy. Good morning, Amira.

Thank you so much for being on our show this morning. How are you doing?

Amira Hegazy [02:01]

Thanks. Good morning. I'm good. I'm doing okay today. How are you?

Christian Solorzano [02:05]

I am doing well. It is— it's— it's— I feel like it's peak fall season because everything is orange outside. And in my neighborhood, there's just piles of leaves, and I love it.

Amira Hegazy [02:18]

I recently walked by this dad-looking person who was raking leaves, and then I saw his kids poking their heads out from the window, and I was like, oh, they're just waiting to jump in those leaves. They are ready to do that. Yeah, there's a really specific joy about it all.

Christian Solorzano [02:39]

So I want to ask you about, for your work, you look at love as an organizing principle in design, and I want to understand that a little bit more. What does that mean?

Amira Hegazy [02:53]

Yeah, so it's something that I'm pulling into my work, but really emerged from my research that I've been doing for the last almost 3 years now at the Design Museum of Chicago. I've been really lucky to work with the Terra Foundation and the Design Museum to have some really like dedicated time to look at actually the typography of Chicago. So initially, when I, when I was brought onto this project, they gave me the prompt.

They're just okay, we want you to research typography in Chicago, which frankly was such a daunting task. Because Chicago has such a rich typographic history, and there's so many books about it already. There's so many people who have looked at it from different angles, and I was trying to think like, well, with this support and with this time that I have, how do I bring something new to the table? What do I look at?

So brought together a bunch of experts, and by experts I mean people from different expertise. So we had people who were graffiti writers, people who were artists, people who were designers, librarians, design historians, organizers at the table with us, and started to talk about what typography does in their life, what letters do for them. Which was a really fun thing to just get to do for a while, to just talk to folks about letters, about the shape of letters, the use of letters in this city.

And I started to understand and see that people haven't spent a lot of time looking at the typography of Chicago in ways that aren't tied to traditional modernisms or industrialization. Or architecture, frankly, as Chicago is such an architectural city. There's been some research about typography on buildings as it pertains to architecture, but maybe not so much the letters and the typography within our communities. And that's where I got really excited. So I started then to look at in communities, what does typography do?

Not just tell us, what a restaurant is or what a store is, but truly what is it doing? How do I know that I belong somewhere when I walk into a neighborhood and I feel really comfortable and at ease? If I feel safe there, what, what's making that happen? And of course there's a lot of design choices that lead into that, and there's a lot of folks who are, who are studying sort of the design of belonging as well.

But when I was looking at that and comparing it to traditional modernisms, I came across consistently this concept of love within radical literatures, within resistance movements, within revolutionary movements, and sort of trying to rebuild post-World War II. Post-World War I, a lot of these Black and brown communities and immigrant communities were consistently talking about love. Whereas we see a lot of white Western communities often talking about universality, making things approachable for the most people, trying to make things easy to understand.

These other groups of people were talking about how do we make this best for us, for our community. So within that, I started to almost reverse engineer a methodology of understanding that maybe these letter forms, this way of designing within community that we sometimes see as ugly or bad design, we see it and we're like, oh, they didn't know what they were doing. I like to consider, what if they did?

What if they did know what they're doing, and we just don't know how they did it yet? Yeah, so by looking at love, by thinking that these letterforms, these ways of working are really to build community-based understandings. To bolster and care for the people in that community, to make them feel seen and known. It's almost like a sublanguage within that, within language, I guess, as design can often be, and as typography can often be.

Love then, within a community setting, actually grows and cares for that culture within the community, even within the larger scope of Chicago.

Christian Solorzano [07:58]

Yeah, I love that. It makes me think about how a lot of the— I think there's a stereotype that graphic designers always judge a menu at a restaurant and they critique it based on how good it looks. And I'm saying good in quotes. And I always find— so I'll give you an example. There's a local business in Berwyn, Illinois. And they have no— the only exterior signage that they have is a piece of paper that has the name of the business in Comic Sans.

But when you walk in, it's the most warm and inviting place. The owner treats you with respect, and just the customer service is like, just, it's so great. So then I start to think about how sometimes great design, in quotes, is used to disguise or to maybe lie to us.

And I think sometimes this handcrafted typography of the people that perhaps is a little bit more imperfect, I think it connects with us on a more personal level because it's— I think as humans we're imperfect and we have our flaws. And I think Seeing the flaws in hand-painted sign, I think, is easier to resonate with as opposed to like something that's beautifully typeset and in a really big, building or something like that. So—

Amira Hegazy [09:30]

And that's the whole thing. If you don't mind me giving just a brief definition here of love that is sort of my working definition. It comes from bell hooks' All About Love: New Visions, and she actually got it from Erich Fromm's the Art of Loving. And they said love is an action. So within this love is a verb. It's the will to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility.

I think the big thing there is that it has to be all of those things at once. So like when we use design and we say like, oh, this looks really great, and this is, this really appeals to this sort of like sleek style, it's really easy to read. Is that also like caring and respecting the people that it's going into their neighborhood.

I often, with my students— I'm lucky enough at UIC to teach a class about this— I introduce gentrification fonts to them, or the concept of a gentrification font.

And it's this thing where, you're walking around a neighborhood, and while these letters on the building look great and they match with the architectural style, they stand out and maybe within a, within a longer-term understanding of neighborhoods and architecture and building, if there's only a couple of buildings that do this, then it can almost be a time marker, like when we see a postmodern building somewhere, we're like, oh yeah, that happened.

But if we keep doing this, then it doesn't actually care or respect or really take responsibility for the growth of that neighborhood. It just sort of makes it equal. It levels out things in a way that erases culture. And I think a lot of times we see that as leveling the playing field. People will often talk about that as like, oh, that's okay. It just makes it available for more people.

But really, those people are often the people in power and the people who are doing the building. The architects, the project managers who are making those choices are— they want it to be appealing to the most people. But do we actually want those people in our neighborhoods?

Christian Solorzano [12:21]

Yeah.

Amira Hegazy [12:22]

Is that, is that the sort of culture that we're building? Is it going to appeal to the people that will actually care for the community? Are the questions that I'm, that I'm really looking into and trying to understand, how do those choices, how do those typographic choices actually build systems of care and love even beyond that?

Christian Solorzano [12:43]

I love that. And what are some of the responses that you get from students, or even from your peers, let's say, at the museum? Because I always I've been trying to untrain my mind to think of— because I think typically graphic design tends to always be associated with profits and power and manipulation.

So to almost flip that on its head and say it could be about something more, that might potentially cause less revenue or less profit margins or whatever, I think, is a really radical thing to say. So do you ever get any— just curious, how do people respond, and does anyone ever challenge you?

Amira Hegazy [13:32]

Yeah. So definitely more so at the beginning of the project. The folks at the museum have been really incredible to work with. Tanner Woodford, Kevin Reeder, Lauren Bogan. I've been working with very closely, and also the folks at the Terra Foundation have been just great allies and collaborators in this work, and they haven't pushed back in ways that make me feel uncared for. I think in a way that as designers and artists, we need criticism.

We need to know where there might be flaws so that we can grow. So definitely within talking about this concept as like, I like to think of it as a parallel modernism. So we have these modernisms that we know that have been written, that are historical in the sense of actually being in books, being considered. But these other things haven't yet been written. What I'm, what I'm researching, and this is a whole other tangent.

Perhaps, but there's a lot of new books and new scholarship coming out recently in the past like 10 years around Black and brown designers in Chicago, trying to name those people and understand where their design voices came from and how they were utilized and sometimes stolen or renamed for other people to take credit for it. So that makes it really difficult sometimes to speak in academic settings with other design historians, especially because I come up from a printmaking background. I have my MFA in print media.

I studied sociology of art in undergrad, and also printmaking, fine art printing. So I learned the history of design by doing it. In some cases, like very process-based. And then I actually learned typography on the bed of a press. I learned it through apprenticeship in letterpress printing. So people often, I think, will learn those things and challenge the way I know things.

But I think, as any designer or any maker, will know, you can know different things about design from doing it than you can from studying it. It's a totally different type of knowledge. And the best writers, the best historians, the best theorists, I think, do a little bit of both. They've tried to design things. They've been in there, been in the design studio, talked to designers, but also spent time in the library.

So a lot of the challenges that I've been getting are from folks who would maybe challenge the way I know things and say, okay, yeah, you can say that because you're a designer and it has this weight, but we have to understand that it's not really history. It's just a thing that happened. And then to that question, I often say, okay, well, what does what does that mean? What makes something history? And they'll tell me, well, it has to change the present.

And that's where, that's where my heart hurts so deeply. And then as a brown person, as a woman, as a minority, I, I've had my experience sort of diminished so many times in educational settings. To say that that's not really the right way to do it. That's not really the right thing.

But to those people, thankfully, with the power that I hold and the, and the positions that I'm in and the tables I get to sit at, I then ask them like, well, have you considered that maybe it does influence the present, just not yours? Which I think is a really important question. For a lot of people to ask themselves in reconsidering what we're doing within design, how our work influences the worlds that we exist in and other people's worlds.

Always within human-centered design, we have, concepts like design after design, how products and things get reused for different purposes over and over again that we can't always know what our work will do. Yeah, and I think beyond that, everyone is always designing. I think within communities, within their lives, like even the systems that I used to fold my laundry this morning, the organizational system of, okay, this goes here and this goes here. I'm gonna put this on and this on.

These in small ways are design choices. And if we, if we can understand that people are constantly working and creating to make their lives better, I don't think it's fair to discount people and the choices that they're making that look like design, that perhaps don't look like the design that we've been taught, to discount them and say, no, that's not design because you didn't go to school with me. No, that's not design because you don't have a computer like I do. That's just unethical. It's elitist.

It's racist in many cases. And just trying to detach myself from those systems in investigating what's happening has been really fruitful, but also a little scary because there's not, there's not a lot of paradigms. For that at the moment.

Christian Solorzano [19:39]

And I want to learn a little bit more about your background. So you're a native of Michigan, and that's where you grew up. So I'm curious and understanding a little bit about what were your interests as a kid and just what was your path to being where you're at today?

Amira Hegazy [19:58]

That's a great question. Sometimes I ask myself the same thing because I'm not always sure how I showed up here. Frankly, it's— my path is guided by so many people in my life who wanted and worked for and helped me find my joy within it. So I think there's a lot of ways that my path has been about trusting people and trusting the ways that people care and love me. And just being like, okay, I'll try that, sure.

Growing up in Michigan, my parents were very divorced. They divorced before I was 1, which is important because I kind of grew up in 2 different worlds. My dad's Egyptian. He moved here when he was 25. He actually lives back in Cairo now with his family. I visit often, very often. Which has been really great. But then I also— my mom is white. She's white American. She spent a lot of time growing up in Texas, Connecticut, Montana. So very all-American sort of person.

And I think growing up this way helped me see the ways that truisms or just assumptions are not helpful, or that everybody has them. Because even like my brother and I, my dad's Muslim and my mom is Christian. I would go to Muslim school, like to the mosque for Quranic instruction on Saturday, and then we'd go to Christian Sunday school on Sunday, and my brother and I would look at each other and be like, well, isn't this the same story? Just in a different language.

Why does everyone think this is so different? So I think that is like a groundwork for what was happening inside of me, always kind of allowed me to see dichotomous truths or things that are separate and told to me as being the opposite, but knowing and being able to hold these 2 truths.

Simultaneously, as they don't negate one another. I think through that, it changed the way that I learned and went into college. So I went to college in Virginia at a school called Washington and Lee University. It's a really small college. It probably was— it definitely was not the right fit for me in a lot of ways, but I made the most of it. I had a lot of really great friends. The culture there was something that I didn't really see myself as part of.

It was really not diverse and very old money, Southern sort of place. I thought I was gonna be a lawyer, and that's what I, that's what I was working to do. So I studied politics, and then we had to, as in liberal arts college, take art classes. So I took a drawing class. And my professor came up to me, and she was like, Amira, you draw like a printer. You should take printmaking. And I was like, I don't know. I have to study politics.

This is what I'm doing. I'm gonna go into law. I'm gonna go be a politician. And she's like, okay. But you can just take a printmaking class. You seem to enjoy art. And I had always done art, but it wasn't a thing that my parents felt comfortable with me pursuing. Especially in the way of immigrant parents. I think the pressure to be in a profession that is like lawyer, engineer, doctor was very high, especially as a woman.

There were a lot of ways in which my dad and the culture that he's come from, that he comes from, diminished what I did and didn't see me in the same ways that perhaps I did my brother. So I felt like I had something to prove by becoming a lawyer. Obviously that didn't happen, thank God.

But through that, I really found that I could care about things in the same ways that I saw or thought lawyers and politicians did, but in a language that was more understandable it was through studying politics, and then eventually I changed my major to sociology. Yeah, just moving through and making art and studying these big sort of global sociopolitical movements and concepts, seeing that over and over again, these huge changes didn't necessarily come from individual people within governments. But they came from the population.

In Arabic, we call it shab, the shab, the people. And over and over again, these people were inspired by art. They were inspired by themselves, by their community. And I was like, well, isn't that what I actually want to do? Do I need to be in this room debating with people over and over again about all of these things? And it honestly got to a certain point where I just couldn't live without making, without making things.

Christian Solorzano [25:36]

Looking at your work and just from speaking with you right now, I see that a lot of your, a lot of your design practice and a lot of the topics that you explore, they tend to be very political and they always, and they tend to be driven by the state of the world as it currently stands. So how do you see how do you see the two coexisting? What role or what things could a designer today that wants to make a difference do through their work?

Because I think, we— I always try to ask people this question on our show here is, for the people that want to make a difference, that let's say are working in some agency or some design studio that perhaps tends to only be focused on Profit-making and so forth. How do you see design being able to make a difference beyond the system of money and just beyond that whole thing?

Amira Hegazy [26:36]

I think that's really important. And frankly, I talk about this a lot with my students. They're consistently asking me. I've had students come up to me and tell me that this love class that I teach at UIC, actually, like they thought that they were maybe gonna switch majors or change because they didn't see themselves within design, that they didn't see ethic or purpose in some ways.

And that has nothing to do with UIC, just this profit-making capitalistic way that they look toward the outside world moving forward and are really scared to lose themselves in the profits and in the money of it. I think there's small ways, frankly, even on like a day-to-day basis. And this has nothing to do with design necessarily. But like now, within every meeting that I'm having with people or the lectures that I'm giving, I start it by recognizing what's going on in Gaza.

And I just say, hey, I'm coming to you today. A little bit depleted because of the grief that I'm feeling. And maybe in a Brené Brown sort of way, just like leading with that vulnerability opens and allows other people to also be like, oh, this is a real thing, that this is something that I, that I need to actually consider.

I think we get bombarded all the time with, this person is suffering, this person is suffering, and it becomes like disembodied, especially in the United States where we have so much privilege. Many of us have so much privilege, or even we can choose not to see the people who live in those ways. Just bringing that to people's attention in your daily life to say, hey, I really need this care from you, my coworkers.

My boss, gives them an understanding of like, oh, this is real, this is serious, this affects me in my daily life. Beyond that, if there's ways that people feel empowered to act toward activism, toward political action, I think NGOs, nonprofits, Always need design help. They're the ones who are going on Canva and using the AI tools, which, are good for their level, are good for getting things out there quickly.

But as we know, a good design to really make something understandable can change the way that people see that work and what's happening. So if you can do pro bono work or volunteer work for these organizations, big or small, that's always a great way to act, or just within right now what we're seeing around activism toward a ceasefire in Gaza. A lot of designers in Chicago and around the world are designing posters and making them available for people to print.

To take to rallies and protests, to put up in their windows. So just using your skills and what you have and what you know to really promote what you care about and put it out there. No act is too small. I think in whatever ways we can not feel helpless, we can be active.

Christian Solorzano [30:21]

I find social media to be a great tool for these type of things, but I also find it really eerie that sometimes you get, we're seeing videos and pictures of people being killed and these terrible war images. And then going from that right next, and right after that you get like a funny meme or some product that's being sold to you. And then once again, it's like another dead person. And I think, I think that's a design flaw because there's no intervention happening.

I mean, aside from the warning and then like see posts that sometimes you get on Instagram, and then, I think all of us just opt in to see the post. But I, I'm always curious about like, how can these tools that everyone is using be a little bit more considerate of the content that's being housed and maybe offer some sort of I don't know.

I don't want to say the word help, but some kind of assistance and just hey, we're noticing that there's like trauma that you're experiencing right now as a result of all of these terrible things that are seen, that you're seeing. Here are some resources, or we're just going to block the app for you for the rest of the day because you've seen too much.

And I don't know, it's so strange because I'll be in a meeting talking with my coworkers and I'll have my phone open and there's these terrible images. And then at the same time, I'm trying to be professional.

Amira Hegazy [32:00]

Yeah, I think at least with what you're saying about being in that meeting, coming to it with that vulnerability that I talked about before and just telling people, hey, this has been really affecting me and this is on my mind. You then have the privilege of not pretending so much. I think that's a personal choice that everyone has to make, and how they want to show up for work.

And I have the privilege to be in the spaces academically and in the museum and sort of the art and design spaces to do that and not have fear of retaliation from an employer. So I know that's not always a thing, but I think that's in those spaces always a good, a good thing to do. I'd also like to point people to the Design Justice Network.

The Design Justice Network thinks a lot about these systems and the ways in which these systems that we live in, that we work in, and that perpetuate this cognitive dissonance between the realities that we see and the realities that we live. They talk a lot about how we can change those systems as designers, how we can design better systems within that. There's a Chicago chapter for those of us in Chicago.

But also, I don't know, maybe this is a bad thing to say on a design podcast. I don't know that design can fix everything.

Christian Solorzano [33:31]

Oh yeah, I agree with you.

Amira Hegazy [33:33]

I think at a certain point, it's you or I posting those things in the grid or on our story and saying like, hey, I'm feeling this. Here's some resources to get through this. And prioritizing those acts of care over shock value or laughter. And that also just leads into a comfort with vulnerability, with sort of saying, hey, I'm not okay, this is hard, and trusting your community that they will see you and that they will hold you and that they may also feel the same way.

I think otherwise it leads into issues of censoring, which, as we know, often are biased. Even with what's happening now, I have friends who will post things from their family in Gaza, from journalists, from artists in the region that will consistently just be taken down, or they'll be, shadow banned by the algorithm of these things, because I think the algorithm does want to promote joy.

It does want to promote these like laughing moments, but that also maybe diminishes the ways in which we can spread truths that aren't being shared otherwise.

Christian Solorzano [35:03]

I love this. I'm loving— I'm really loving this conversation. And I feel like it's— it feels— it's definitely very relevant. And I'm so glad that we're having it. And I want to ask you, I want you to speak with us a little bit about your— so this project that you're doing at the museum, I understand that there's going to be an exhibition in 2024, and you mentioned that it's been 3 years in the making.

Amira Hegazy [35:30]

Yeah. So it's going to be part of the Art Design Chicago series, which, as we know, it's happened a few times here in Chicago already, funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art. There's some exhibitions in the city already up that have to do with Art Design Chicago, which really pulls out and creates new scholarship and understanding of Chicago's roots as it pertains to art and design.

So there's a great exhibition up at the MCA right now, also at the museum, the National Museum of Mexican Art down in Pilsen.

Christian Solorzano [36:13]

So yeah, it'll be part of that and can you share with us some of your, maybe some of your biggest surprises or like biggest discoveries? Like what did you, what did you find about the neighborhoods, people that you spoke with? Could you give us a little teaser as to maybe what to expect?

Amira Hegazy [36:32]

Yeah, so I, I've been, I think that the time that I've been given is such a privilege. I guess, to be able to study this for this extended period of time. So I use a research protocol called community-based participatory research, in which I seek constant consent from the people that I'm working with, that I'm studying, and actually try to put myself inside of those communities.

I don't go and study them and see the thing and say, oh, this must mean this, as if I have some authority on their culture. Within that, I've learned some really cool things and met some really amazing people. I spent some time with a graffiti crew here in Chicago, about 6 months, sort of running around with them, learning from them, learning their letterforms, being in their community, going to parties, going to different events. And that was so Illuminating for me.

Just, I mean, this also speaks to the culture that I grew up in some ways, that wasn't something I was around, that like my mom would look at graffiti and just be like, oh, that's so ugly, why would they do that? And I always enjoyed seeing it, but never really understood like what it was, what it was doing as a young person. So learning that they actually have— most crews have archivists.

Who will photograph, sometimes video the work that's happening in those communities and keep track of the pieces that are made by each writer and build these legacies. But those archives and these stories are really well kept. I think some of the things that I learned, and I always think this is always a thing in social science, is that we study life and some of our discoveries are things that are obvious to other people, just obvious in the ways that people live.

But understanding that, a lot of these choices, these design choices, are made to keep people out, are made for the sole purpose of building safety within communities that, sometimes people don't feel safe when other people are around, and that design can be made to deter those people, that we can use these encoded ways of writing, not just graffiti writing, but other sort of typographic choices to actually deter people who make us feel unsafe. And I've never really thought about that.

I had never thought about that as a design principle. Of deterrence rather than attraction, attracting more customers to a business. But that also as an aspect of love, frankly. When you love someone, you can't love everyone. It's impossible. It's totally impossible. And by loving one person, sometimes that means that you have to just keep other people at an arm's distance. That Care is a very different act than love. You can care for almost everyone, but you cannot love everyone.

And only within love can we see growth, can we see people prosper. Care is just a basic sustaining of existence, frankly. So those are some big things. I think also looking at the ways that typefaces, modernist typefaces, were utilized in different communities on different types of grid systems. So we often think about our basic Swiss grid system.

I recently heard Silas Munroe talk at a symposium at the University of Chicago, and he was talking about the Black grid and investigating ways that designers from non-white cultures and lineages actually build design on different geometries and within different systems, and have been since ancient times. So like looking at the ways that those typefaces are utilized and recoded within different communities, that one typeface can be one thing in Pilsen and a totally different thing in Lakeview.

And also the ways that As we know, in Chicago, immigrant communities are often moving within the city. We see old signage and typefaces being readopted and then recoded to mean and indicate, to signify different things. So yeah, very excited.

Christian Solorzano [41:31]

Yeah, I never thought about design as a deterrent. That really surprised me. But I think it makes perfect sense because I'm always I always find myself in conversations, for example, at work, where a design that we're working through is intended to be so hyper-inclusive that it becomes neutral in the sense that it doesn't touch anyone on a profound level because it's so surface-based, as opposed to maybe being a little bit more pinpointed and focusing on particular qualities.

I think that— I think there's a big difference between like the quality of something as opposed to like the quantity of how much reach it might have. And I think just the idea of reach, which is, which tends to be a metric for success, is such a— it's such a flawed thing to think that reach signifies better. And it's usually through the lens of, again, like through the lens of profits.

Amira Hegazy [42:35]

Exactly. More isn't always more. More is sometimes too much.

Christian Solorzano [42:42]

I was talking with some friends yesterday and we were discussing, we were talking about putting together a museum exhibition and I made the mistake of calling the audience, like the people going to the museum, like users. I was like, well, the user would go, they would go walk around this. And I caught myself and I'm like, it's just that terminology, I feel like, has become so ingrained to the point where I catch myself sometimes calling people a user.

Amira Hegazy [43:12]

Oh, totally. And then it like dehumanizes them only to like the use value that they provide for the profit of the thing. Yeah, we talk about that a lot in my classes. Just how do we see people as people? How can we utilize co-design processes and other processes where we as the designer aren't the center of the universe, where we let people design things, where we trust people?

How do we learn to trust the people that we're designing for and not think that we're smarter than them? To use our creative thought, to use our methodologies to help collaborate. We think a lot about collaborative imagining as a thing. So it's, yeah, it's really hard. It's— and I sound— I feel like I sound ridiculous saying, wow, it's so hard to think about people as people.

It's just within the ways that we've been taught, and I think design education in a lot of ways historically Thinks about people as, yeah, users, people who are going to use a thing, and not necessarily what that thing does to them, but what it adds to them. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to do right now.

Thinking about exhibition design has been Interesting, because now I'm moving from being a research fellow into the curator for the exhibition at the Design Museum, and trying to think about like, how do we— I don't know, this is from the beginning always a big question. I'm like, how do I get people excited about the shape of letters? And not in like a bubble letter. S thing that we did in elementary school sort of way. Exactly.

There's always those ways to make it into a sensational looking thing. But how do I get people to look at letterforms, usage of letterforms, layout, and really see like Oh, I've been reading design without knowing that I've been reading design, and really try to consider this, but in the most unpretentious way.

I think design is so exciting, and even just— I download fonts and stuff, and I recently designed a font for protest where every single letter of the alphabet, every glyph, every number is coded as the word ceasefire. So anything you type, it just comes out with the word ceasefire and also then reads in on a lot of websites as the default Georgia Times New Roman, Calibri, whatever. I made it in a bunch of different ones.

So then the whole, the whole page will be the word ceasefire, every single paragraph, every single thing that was ever typed on that page. It's pretty fun. But when I was sending it out to my friends and colleagues and organizers, they were like, how do I use this? How do I— what? There's no font in here. And I'm like, oh, so like how deeply we are in the design world trying to step back and be like, how do I make this accessible and empowering?

It's really hard, and I like to think about that within most of design. How do we make this empowering? Not just useful, but how does it make people feel better, feel smarter, feel ready to share this thing? And I think that's also very profit-driven in some cases. But empowering, I think, is really is really often the goal within my design practice, not making something useful.

Christian Solorzano [47:30]

I found that anytime I'm seeking outside feedback, I've noticed that younger people, like kids, tend to be good at being brutally honest. So my brother and I were 11 years apart, and he was always— he's always been like my biggest critic. And anytime I've had any idea, I run it through him. And most of the time he's right. He'll tell me like, this doesn't make any sense. No one's gonna understand this. And some— when anytime I don't listen to him, no one understands.

And it just doesn't make any sense. So.

Amira Hegazy [48:06]

Totally. Being a teacher is very humbling. At the beginning of the semester, I always tell them that I'll probably learn more from them than they learn from me over the semester. Trying to kind of show them that young people who often think of themselves as not knowing things, as being sort of unstable, that they know so much.

And that they don't need to reprogram themselves by going to school. They need to go to school to learn more. And then with those rules, we get to decide what we move forward with in our understanding.

Young people are great. I also think that young people today see design very differently because their access to design and their sort of native nature to like design tools that we're using today. So even just video editing, they're so good at video editing. They can just make things so quickly on their phones. When I think about letterforms, I often like to draw them by hand first. Starting digitally is weird to me, but they're just— they're able to do that.

So trying to learn from them in those ways, but also teach them that real things, physical things, also are useful, that we can learn from a pencil things that we can't learn from a touchscreen.

Christian Solorzano [49:39]

They're native power users.

Amira Hegazy [49:41]

Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're great. They're great. But they, and they also, I think, are so different in the ways that they think about work and what they want their work life to do. Which kind of leads back to your other, your other point before, just I think these sorts of questions are questions that are on their mind.

Whenever I've given a few lectures about my research, and every single time, I swear, I have students for like at least half an hour, sometimes more afterward, like asking me questions about the research, about what it, what it has to do within their design education, how they can think about things through this way. Like they're really excited to think about design in these ways. And I, something that I always try to emphasize to them is that it's really not the design.

It's not, it's not the design. It's about, it's about you as the designer, and that like design can do some things, but it's really the people who do the most. And being able to find that confidence and that care and that vulnerability within yourself as the designer when you come into spaces to even be empowered to or asked to make design in this way is the hardest part. Making the thing is sometimes secondary to showing up for it.

Christian Solorzano [51:07]

I also teach and I always get the questions of learning the software and like learning the tool. And I always say how that's like the— you can learn that on YouTube. That's like the easy part. The difficult part is yeah, like you were saying, like just everything else around it, everything coming before and everything that will come after as well.

Amira Hegazy [51:27]

Yeah, the courage, the courage to make the thing, and to, when somebody pushes back against something that you really believe in, to say, no, this is important. That's honestly why and how I got most of the work I have now, is because somebody told me like, hey, that, that's not really a thing, that thing that you're studying, the thing that you're looking at, that's weird. And I'm like, yeah, it is, but it is a thing, let me tell you.

Yeah, and it's been really great because of that. But I think only with the support of the folks at the museum and with my mentors like Bess Williamson and Chris Dingwall and Dakota Brown have I been able to feel really seated in this research and feel confident that what I'm doing is real and worth it and worth fighting for and worth sort of giving people my time to teach them that there are different ways of looking at design.

There's different ways of working in design, and that design looks different, and that doesn't mean it's bad.

Christian Solorzano [52:37]

So you're teaching, you're doing research, you're— I get the impression that you're just constantly immersed in this world of design. But what other things outside of all of this stuff are you into? What's something that no one would, no one knows about you, or maybe some, just talk to us a little bit about Amira, the non-designer.

Amira Hegazy [53:02]

Yeah, there's a lot. This summer I took this really incredible trip. I drove, I was lucky enough. I think this is the best thing about teaching is that when you can tool it right, you can have some really good time off. So I went and worked for a little bit at a place called Rare Book School in Virginia. I teach like historic printing there alongside book bibliographic scholars, so teach people how to use a Gutenberg press and a Rembrandt press and those sorts of things.

And then from there, so I drove down the East Coast to Virginia. And then from there I just took about a month and a half off of work almost entirely. I had a few, a few commissions that I was finishing, and I just camped. I like alone just camped across the country. So I drove from Charlottesville, Virginia to Los Angeles, California, and then from Los Angeles up to Portland, Oregon, and then from Portland to Montana.

And then my car broke down in Montana, which was unfortunate but also part of the journey. I just recently got my car back. It was an engine recall. So now my car has a new engine, which is pretty cool. But yeah, so just was camping. I was driving, and whenever I felt like I didn't want to drive anymore, I would Look up a campsite and just pitch my tent and go hiking and then make food.

And it was really amazing just to have that time off, that like time of rest and exploration. I'm trying to spend a lot of time out in nature. I used to, in Virginia, I used to live in a small town called Lexington, which was really close to the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Appalachian Trail. And I think that proximity to nature was very freeing, very nourishing. I don't get that so much here. So I have a lot of plants in my art studio.

I used to have a really large garden. I miss gardening.

Christian Solorzano [55:16]

A lot of community work, and I experienced this with a club, is that it's a lot of work, and it's also very easy to get burnt out and also and then just being a human and witnessing everything else that's going on. I feel like that's the perfect recipe for just immediate disaster that sometimes you become unaware of because you're just so in it. Really.

Amira Hegazy [55:42]

It's like compassion fatigue. It's awful. I mean, I go to therapy, which is great, and that's been really useful. Go quite as often during the summers when I'm not teaching. But definitely when I have students, caring about, caring about young people, fostering their creativity and their growth is a lot. It's a lot of pressure to take on.

And then in the community work as well, sort of being able to know what your limits are and not extend yourself too far involves a lot of understanding also where resources are. And knowing where to point people. I think building boundaries has been a very useful skill for me in the past few years, because people get so excited that I care about what they're doing. And I really do, but I can't do everything.

I'm one individual person, and I do have money to pay people that I work with. And I can pay them through that fund, but it's not it's not unlimited. I can't just like always show up and do these things because I'm also trying to survive too. And hopefully one day I'll be in a position where I can support more people and do more good. But to get there, I have to sustain myself. And also I have a really amazing community of friends.

Around me who, if I, if I really need it, or even if I just sometimes kind of a little bit need it, they show up with a hug and a movie and dinner and just really great folks that I'm lucky to have around me. It's important. It's important.

I row too, which is another thing, being physically active, being able to get out of my mind has been really important within this work, just like to be in my body and to be bad at something is really underestimated. I just show up and row crew on like a team in Lincoln Park. And honestly, I don't really know what I'm doing. Like they teach us and I'm learning and I'm— I think I'm okay at it now. But it's really great to just be like, wow.

I'm not wonderful at this, and how freeing. And also to not need to be wonderful at it, to just do it for the joy of it, is something that I think in my professional life I really lost touch with.

Christian Solorzano [58:19]

I feel like it's so easy to get into the swing of thinking that everything that you're doing is great because maybe you're getting positive feedback or you're invested in a lot of these projects. But you do— like, I train martial arts, and sometimes I'm feeling really great about myself. But then you go there and you come out and you're like, all right, I'm just a human.

Amira Hegazy [58:40]

Yeah, you find yourself on the ground or in the water and you're like, wow, okay world, I see you, I see you. Thank you, thank you for reminding me. Yeah I'm just human. And just like find— finding the joy in learning something and not having to be like growth-minded about everything ever. I think that is like a way in which I try to combat what you're talking about with like profits and these capitalist mindsets that it's like, no, I just do it because I do it.

And that's enough. I don't, I don't have to try to be the best.

Christian Solorzano [59:23]

So we're almost at time, but I want to ask you, it might be a very big question. What is a utopia? Or what is, what do you see as like, when you think about the future, what excites you the most about the future? What kind of, what kind of world do you want to see? And maybe for the listener, what are some things that we could do to maybe get closer to an ideal, an ideal place in which design has more of a Positive impact, or—

Amira Hegazy [59:59]

Yeah, I think right now the first idea of a hopeful utopian future that just pops into my head is a free Palestine, a free Palestine where Jews and Christians and Muslims live together on that land, care for that land, cultivate the olive groves on that land.

And I think within that picture, I'm it's leading me to think about the ways that sociopolitically we're pushed against each other to think about borders and demarcations and difference as the most important barriers in our life, rather than thinking about our similarities as more important, as the ways in which we can Care for each other, work with each other, build with each other.

I think it, it's gonna come to a point where we just really have to, we have to say, this isn't, this isn't me, and this isn't what I stand for anymore. I'm not okay with seeing suffering on Instagram. Therefore, I need to work for less suffering. I think it involves not being exclusionary within our work, understanding that maybe not everything is for everyone, and that that's totally okay.

Within design, sort of looking toward more accessibility in different ways, knowing also that more access for one person sometimes makes less access for some other people, and being upfront about that and knowing about that and owning that. I think it's often the ways in design that we talk about utopias as if it's possible to make one utopia for everybody. But it's not. People want different things. Cultures look different. People work in different ways.

And respecting that, listening to them, and being like, okay, yeah, like you can do that and I'm not gonna hate you for it, but I don't really need to be involved in it. As long as long as you're not hurting me, as long as you're not promoting hatefulness. Difference, I think, is beautiful. And over time in design, we've often leaned into homogeneity to create something that we call access, but within that we're erasing so much and telling people that what they like isn't good enough.

It has to look the same. And I do think that the younger generation and my generation, our generation to some extent, is doing that, is starting to see that and starting to lean into weird things. In new ways, so that's exciting. But I also hope that somebody has a better utopia.

I don't know, I'm very much here for— I'm here for being proven wrong consistently in hopes that there's always a better, that somebody can dream more, can dream better, can create better than I can, or in collaboration we can do better. Yeah, just really less hate if it's possible, which is so cliché because I'm on here talking about love, but I am who I am. I am who I am, Christian.

Christian Solorzano [63:33]

I love it. Thank you so much for this great conversation. We're really looking forward to your exhibition. So once there's more details on that, please let us know because we want to, we want to let everyone know. Are there any other projects or anything else that you want to share with us that we could be on the lookout for? Anything you want to promote?

Amira Hegazy [63:55]

That's a great question. I think, honestly, just go out there if you're able to, if you're excited about it, to the protests to help call for a ceasefire in Gaza. That's where a lot of my creative energy is going right now, just helping printing, organizing, designing. Toward a more loving and safe future for my people and hopefully all oppressed and Indigenous people in the world. That's really where my mind is right now. But also, yeah, the exhibition will be happening. It'll open in November 2024.

It'll be up at the Design Museum until April 2025. And then we're actually traveling the exhibition to different neighborhoods in the city to make sure that this work is accessible to the folks who the work is about.

So we'll be traveling it to local venues at this point in Pilsen and Bronzeville, perhaps other places as our funding allows us, just to make sure that the people who are in it feel comfortable and safe to see their own work and to see it lifted up in these ways and understand where the typography and their typographic history lives within the city. I'm writing an essay that'll soon be out in 60 Inches from Center, working on writing some other things as well.

So if there's opportunities for that, I'm very excited to do that as well. But I think that's it in terms of the horizon right now.

Christian Solorzano [65:37]

And what are you reading? Are you reading anything at the moment, watching anything, listening to anything?

Amira Hegazy [65:43]

Yeah. I just finished Rebecca Solnit's a Field Guide to Getting Lost, which was really great. Talks about the unknown in some really interesting ways. I listen to Your Hidden Brain a lot from NPR. I just started reading Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri. I read a lot of poetry. I've been rereading Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky lately. And then honestly, just keeping up with the reading for my classes as well is always, is always a lot of work.

So lots of readings around human-centered design practice, purpose-based design, writing and creating methodologies, design methodologies, experimental methodologies as well. And as always, kind of, I feel like I'm always rereading All About Love by bell hooks, just as it pertains to my research, referencing a lot of things back and forth.

Christian Solorzano [66:48]

All right. Well, thank you so much. This was great. And like I said, we're looking forward to all this work that you're doing and yeah, looking to stay in touch.

Amira Hegazy [66:59]

Yeah. Thanks so much. I'm excited about it too. Anyone can reach out to me. Excited to collaborate, to hear what people are doing.

Christian Solorzano [67:08]

As always, thank you so much for staying until the end. I really appreciate it. And just for your awareness the Chicago Graphic Design Club is looking forward to 2024. We have some exciting programming for you. So if you're in Chicago, please stay on the lookout and follow us on social media, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. LinkedIn because we will be sharing some upcoming exciting things that we'll be doing in January and February. So as usual, thank you so much and we'll talk soon.