Christian Solorzano [00:45]

Hello, you're listening to Underscore, a show by the Chicago Graphic Design Club. I am your host, Christian Solorzano, and on today's conversation, I speak with co-founder and co-executive director of Greater Good Studio. We spend time talking about the ethos that drives the studio's social mission to use design as an agent for change, and we also discuss the importance of defining what good means within the context and practice of the design craft and discipline.

George, who describes himself as a pissed-off optimist, talks to us about the cost of speaking up and the courage that it takes to stand up for one's values. And it's no surprise that in the last few years we've seen a rise of design studios taking a stance and making bold statements around diversity, equity, and inclusion. But to me, Greater Good has always been at the forefront of working towards making a difference within the outputs that they're creating collectively through their work.

He also shares with us some personal stories of the ethical dilemma that as designers we often face when we run into the situation in which we're forced design things that perhaps aren't in the best interest of ourselves and the person on the receiving end. And as usual, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope that you find this conversation as inspiring as I did, and we'll talk soon. Enjoy. Hello, George. How are you doing today?

George Aye [02:14]

I'm great. Thanks so much for inviting me here, Christian.

Christian Solorzano [02:18]

I've been wanting to speak with you for a very long time. I don't know if you remember, but I think it was 2014 or 2015, you gave a talk at DePaul University, and it was in a very small auditorium. It was a brand new space too. I had never been in that room, so it was like my first time hearing about Greater Good Studio and also being in that space.

And I remember your— I don't remember like the details of what you spoke about, but it left a very strong impression. And I think after that, I was like, I need to, I need to work there because a lot of the stuff that you were, that you were mentioning, I had never heard a designer speak about. Things such as designing for good, like just good and design were never two things that I ever associated with one another.

To me, graphic design was always about making things look presentable and making them be something that could sell a product or a service. So, Your way of explaining design as something that goes beyond what we see, to me, was like pretty punk rock. There is like an attitude and like an edge to your presentation, even though you're very soft-spoken and polite and everything was just very— it felt like a very academic punk rock presentation.

George Aye [03:36]

Oh, that is fascinating. Thank you for remembering that. I've never been described. I never heard my talk or work described as being academic and punk rock at the same time.

I appreciate that there is a radical component to the work that we do or the style of work that we do, and yet I feel so sad that it should be radical at all because it really isn't. Not to get too pedantic about it, but what is good and what counts as good is a very curious topic area.

I think for me growing up as a fan of design, as an ardent supporter and someone who loves design, what counted as good was always around execution and always around what counted as high fidelity and of technical excellence or even theoretical excellence or even having Provenance towards a kind of craft-based meaning.

And then when you think about what good can mean in the world, what the word good typically means outside of design, the part then becomes curious: Why haven't we applied those other, the other usage of word good? As in not bad, or maybe for the good of other people. Why is it that we haven't applied that to our craft? And I think the idea of just wanting to put those in the same sentence, in the same thought, was partly the goals of the studio.

Christian Solorzano [05:18]

And I think what I remember from that presentation was that you were giving good this new definition of what good could be, or what at least good was according to your studio, which I think often we think we refer to things as good, but it's usually on the basis of someone else's definition. Or there's like this status quo that sort of creates that baseline for what excellence or good is. So just the idea of asking like, what is good and what does good mean to me?

I think is a great question that all designers should ask themselves.

George Aye [06:00]

Yeah, I mean maybe just to kind of break down some of this stuff, I do think that even knowing that the way the name of the studio has certain connotations of it extolling a social mission as a real get-down-to, brass tacks type issue, we picked the name primarily on what we could find a bloody website domain for? It's as basic as that. Could we find domain names? GoDaddy, whatever it was, like looking at all these different like.com search engines.

I'm like, what do we— because we figured there's no point having a studio name that can't be replicated on a website because this is back in 2010, 2011. We're still old school enough to remember having to find names searches for that. If you couldn't find it, I wouldn't want to have the awkwardness of having a name of the studio and then it not being easily reflected when you search for it or typed it in. Yeah.

So it's not quite that we named the studio after the website, but we almost did. So I do think that there's like some practical aspects of just like starting a company and also trying to find something that works. But also when you go back to it, there is a philosophical question of like, what is good? What does it mean to do good? And what does it mean to be a good person in the world who happens to have training and skills?

Christian Solorzano [07:19]

Yeah.

George Aye [07:19]

So, what does it mean to be a good doctor or be a good lawyer or good engineer probably has a very clear technical executional competence component.

And then there is a larger question of like, are you still a good lawyer if you are representing bad clients? Are you still a good doctor if the work you're doing is causing greater harm in the overall? So that is a second order question that can be leveled at the work we do as designers. But I don't remember hearing that being brought up much, certainly not when I was being educated or when we had a lot of discussions with other design professionals.

That second-order question, I thought it was relevant, but not that, not that commonly brought up. So I think your observation is completely correct. Yeah, it isn't common, but I wish it were more.

Christian Solorzano [08:11]

Yeah. And I want to go back in time a little bit to life before like, what was your life before design? You were, you were in engineering. You did, you studied engineering, and you didn't grow up in Chicago. So I'm curious about, what were you as a kid? Did you always think about these things? What were some of your interests?

And looking back now, does it make sense that you, that you're in the position that you're at today of like, does it all seem like, of course I would be doing this?

George Aye [08:46]

No, not particularly, of course. I think there was a— the more likely outcome would have been me working as like some sort of regional manager of like a Best Buy or whatever the local version would have been in England where I grew up. More likely, that was probably where it would have been. That's probably more, maybe all I had imagined. But I did remember seeing a documentary growing up in England of somebody describing the job of a designer.

I think the company was called Imagination, which I don't think even exists anymore.

This is years ago, probably in the mid-'80s. I saw this documentary and I remember thinking like, that is the coolest thing I'd ever heard. I never heard of like, that's a job. I can't believe that's something you can do. I hadn't even conceived that was something that had to be paid for, 'cause I think growing up as a kid, that wasn't really necessarily a thing I thought much about. Just you can do that? I didn't know you could even do that.

And I think it kind of caught my attention of like, that sounds really fun and cool. And that was kind of it for a long time, was just that sounds really fun and cool.

So wanting to study or maybe to pursue it, there was always a bit of a I think a tension that perhaps not everybody shares, but maybe shared by a lot of immigrant children, especially Asian immigrant children, is an expectation of doing something that is craft-based or arts-based that isn't engineering or medicine or law is an anomaly. And I think if you're presented, if you're kind of like talking to your parents or have references to parents like mine, that's a tough one to get over.

I think the closest that they could relate to design was engineering, which is not then too surprising that that's kind of where I ended up studying because that was— that one like counted. Whereas design was like a— they looked at me like, what are you talking about? That's not a real job, right?

Christian Solorzano [10:44]

Yeah.

George Aye [10:45]

So engineering was a little closer in that felt a little more tangible, I think, for them.

Christian Solorzano [10:48]

Yeah. And aside from that documentary, were there any other design, just experiences that you experience that sort of you think fondly of? Was there ever like a catalyst of like, I really love this type of work, I love— like, this is what I want to do? For some people it might be like album covers or Legos, but for you, was there a particular craft or practice that you were really drawn to?

George Aye [11:18]

Yeah, it was obsessing over type. I think it was just something that I really wanted to fall in love with primarily because it was so obscure compared to maybe what other people may have otherwise been into.

I certainly was, I think, in the same way most people are exposed to type, but maybe not realizing, oh, that's a thing you can do or that you could study or that maybe there are differences in how one type versus another typeface, my amateur hour obsession with it was enough to make me feel like, oh, maybe that's something I should go study. And it was so esoteric.

That was definitely when my parents were looking at me like, what do you— like, that is, you've picked already an outside lane and then you would pick the most obscure version of it. Good luck with that.

So that became more like a— not even a side hustle, it was more like a secret love. Was wanting to maybe understand what type was or maybe figure out where I can go study it. And I'd say maybe the only other big influential thing might have been reading or seeing the book about Toubal Kalman, the graphic designer.

I think you and I talked about it briefly last time we chatted. Because I think for his work in the little bits I was finding of him, it seemed so both irreverent and radical and also founded— I think I was reading either his own bio, the way he described himself was being an untrained graphic designer.

And I remember thinking that sentence was a huge relief because I felt like, oh, I'm allowed to— like, did this guy just give me permission to do this even though I don't think I formally have been trained or could or really should be able to do this? It was a gift.

Just to read that, because I thought, wait, maybe I can do this thing because like, look at this guy. Again, like I had no personal connection to it. It was just more, just so inspiring because the work was so unusual. It was such a powerful mix of photography, imagery, and type and ideas as expressed through these magazine covers from Colors magazine. This is like going back a long time now.

That I thought, who the fuck is like, who is this? What is happening? I've never seen anything like it. It was so original. And the idea that you could, you could crash things together so expressively and still do it with so much style was massively inspiring. And also thinking, not that I could do it, but rather, wait, maybe there is a path for me here. It gave me a lot of hope.

Christian Solorzano [13:57]

Yeah, I remember hearing about him and like learning about how he would define himself as a, as a contrarian, like just always kind of contradicting and like challenging the status quo. And I, and I, and growing up, that was always like a bad quality in a person. You never want to be a disruptor. You never want to question your elders or any of that kind of stuff.

So seeing someone that was like established and doing really great work to me was like, well, here's someone that's doing it, and it seems like it's going well for them. There might be a space for me to do something like that as well. And yeah, and here we are.

George Aye [14:35]

Yeah. I mean, I think that if you go back to that earlier question, does this all make sense? The only solace I could take is that I did grow up in a household with some radical components to it, in that my dad was fairly radical. And I think also being Buddhist, being Burmese in particular, because that's where I was born, there is a certain shared sense of social responsibility amongst the work that we do or that one does work. In a way that is responsible.

So if I'm going to be a failed doctor, which is again the path that everyone had hoped for but miserably could never do, the only way it could make sense is that if I'm gonna do design, I would like it to have some of something close to what it would've had been as impact. If I'd been a doctor.

So if I'm gonna like take the one thing I'm good at or passionate about, but still steer it towards something that I'm never gonna reach, but could be inspired by, which is like caring for others. Maybe this is what happens when you take an unmet, unfulfilled desire to be a doctor, but do it through the training I happen to have, which is InDesign.

Christian Solorzano [15:42]

Yeah. And the other story that I remember hearing about you is that, and this was something that you shared, and it was about your experience working at IDEO and having to, you were working on 2 clients, you were working on Something to do like helping diabetes or like doing something along those lines. Like you were helping the audience that is dealing with diabetes. And at the same time, you were also doing design for, I believe, like some sugar water company.

George Aye [16:14]

Kool-Aid.

Christian Solorzano [16:14]

Kool-Aid. Yeah. So just like the conflict of interest and just being at the center of these 2 opposing forces, like I feel like a lot of designers could relate to that where we have this ambition to make a difference, but then the work that we do contradicts our desires and our moral compass. So can you share a little bit about once you're introduced into the world of professional design, you're working with clients, you're doing all this stuff, what was your experience like?

Was it a culture shock? What was that like to all of a sudden be working on things that perhaps don't sit with your heart.

George Aye [16:57]

Yeah, it's probably worth mentioning that I felt so unbelievably lucky just to get a job in design and especially at a place like IDEO, which was willing to pay for my visa and to ship me across the country, sorry, across the world from London to Chicago. It was my primary My primary goal for the first several years was don't fuck this up. That was it. That was the only repeated mantra I had every day.

So the idea that I could get paid to do this remarkable thing with, I thought, some of the best designers I'd ever seen in my life or heard about was— I was beyond grateful. I just couldn't even believe my luck. So it wasn't like I went into some of these commercial professional settings suspicious. It was more just I can't believe I get to do this.

But over time, again, one of the very first projects I worked on was this insulin delivery device, this little pen-shaped thing that you inject yourself. You like measure the dose and then you would inject a certain amount of insulin for self-dosing. That was, that felt so undeniably good in all the ways in which that word can be defined. But I did notice that I would talk to my parents about it. Again, old school Asian parents where the expectation perhaps you, what are you doing?

Especially what are you doing out there in this other country? I'm gonna tell 'em about those projects. And what I noticed over time was that I stopped telling them about the vast majority of projects I worked on that were mostly commercial.

It was like I was editing them out of my stories. And then the ones I would occasionally bring up might be for a project for a hospital or something that wasn't at least so heinously commercial. And I thought, wait, why am I doing this? Why am I not just telling them everything? Surely, hey, I don't think they understand what I'm doing anyway. So it's not like that makes, they're gonna have a critical view of it.

Why would I find myself talking about some and not the others? And I think maybe for a lot of designers who are who are getting, exposure to working in a commercial setting is I think most people do recognize that there is that difference, but they've been conditioned to think we can't talk about it.

So that internalization of like, do I bring it up or do I bring it not— bring it up or not? I was, I think, worried that if I don't pay attention to this distinction, I might lose touch with that. And I think by the time I finally left IDEO, I was pretty convinced that if I don't leave by now after 7 years, I'm gonna become numb to this observation.

I'm gonna become numb to the feeling of this discrepancy. 'Cause by that point I was becoming more and more aware that, oh yeah, there actually is quite a lot of a portfolio we describe to the world and then a portfolio we actually do. And the difference between those 2 is bigger than anyone would imagine. I think that's probably true of a lot of studios. But that was a big takeaway from my time there was there's a gulf between these 2 internal and external portfolios.

Christian Solorzano [20:09]

Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm always very suspicious about terms like human-centered design, because the big question is always, well, which human are you referring to? And it's always, I mean, a gun is human-centered if you're thinking about the person shooting the gun.

George Aye [20:29]

I think it's economic. Yeah, it's been designed to elicit a whole bunch of feelings. Yeah, it's cool, if you're really into those types of things. Yeah, it is clearly done with enormous amount of intent for sure.

Christian Solorzano [20:42]

Yeah. So just this question again, what is good? What is design? Who are the humans that we're designing for? And often I almost feel like we were designing for the stakeholders and they're our primary users, if we want to use that term. And I just admire so much of what your studio is doing. I've had a chance to listen to a lot of your talks and just read things that you've published online.

And it's just so cool to see someone be so honest and just in my opinion, like willing to take that risk to be vocal about it, because I think a lot of us would think that it's like a career killer to open up your mouth and say certain things about our industry.

So a follow-up question to that is like, how did you find the courage to start being vocal about some of the things that you were seeing, specifically your letter to your Surviving IDO letter that you published, I think May 24th, 2021. So it's been 3 years, I believe. So just for the listener, for me, how do you— how does someone get over the fear of being honest with themselves and with each other?

George Aye [22:02]

I think it's probably more accurate to say that most people are trying to be honest with themselves. And I think they're trying to reconcile how insane the world is around them. And that because— not because people are trying to be self-deceptive on purpose, but the only way to make sense of how broken the world is, particularly in a late-stage capitalist design world that we operate in, you have to create essentially a story about what makes sense. Otherwise, everything collapses upon itself.

This is a term that I remember hearing bit of a sidebar around child development, something called a healing narrative. A healing narrative is something that I later learned to realize, oh, that's maybe something I did to kind of make sense of my childhood, because the harsh reality of certain things that you grow up with are hard to reconcile with a childlike brain. So you create a story of what could make sense.

And in the case of when healing narratives typically used, you end up often blaming yourself for stuff you can't understand because as a child, you go, well, I'm not being— maybe getting the attention I deserve. Maybe that's because I did something wrong. So it may not be accurate, but that's a way you kind of make sense of it.

As an adult designer, maybe the healing narrative you have to tell yourself is, Wombi, how bad can this project be? Or, if we don't do it, I know someone else is gonna get paid to do it. You end up telling yourself certain stories just to soothe yourself. And I don't think anyone's actively trying to lie, but I do think that sometimes we may not pause to check what is the story we're telling ourselves today that helps us get through the— just get through our workday.

The idea of wanting to write in this case around the idea letter or really in some of the other things I've written about comes from wanting to share that like, these observations that I'm having are probably real, and I suspect other people have those feelings too.

And that if there is a written position that says, I don't know if I have all the answers, and I don't suspect that anyone else does too, but if I could take you through the journey I went through, maybe you'll find some solace in that exploration that I did.

And I found from actually a lot of the stuff I've tried to write is that it's a healing process. I would encourage a lot of folks who are maybe struggling with something that they have on their mind maybe to write something and don't hit publish at all, but to maybe just sit with the writing that you've done about your own experiences, maybe about the industry as we talked about or others, and try to see how much benefit you get just from having it be real.

Almost like if you were reading about someone else's life. And I got an awful lot out of that actually as a personal journey.

But I think there's a certain amount of accountability and perhaps a misplaced sense of duty that might tip someone over the edge. And I think at least in my case, this is funny, but I was teaching just at the very first time starting to teach an ethics class, design ethics class up at Northwestern. And I was sat with reading the comments, sorry, the final assignments for my students.

And I had to make a decision because I'm telling them, hey, you really should be making better ethical choices in your design career. I'm sitting now, do I pursue this letter or not? And I realized like, if I don't pursue it, I don't think I could ever teach this class again.

Because I'm now facing the same fork in the road that I've been telling my students to have to confront. So it felt a little bit of a relief to realize, oh, I think I have to do this.

And also, I guess committing, because once you do, it kind of takes some of the, I don't know, the vacillation that you go through and just say, look, this is gonna happen. I'm gonna have to take, I have to just see how this goes. We see where this goes. And then wherever that goes logically is where it ends up. And I think you maybe have to be okay with it, be okay with the outcome taking its logical course.

Now, I'm not looking for a career-ending outcome. I'm not looking to seriously damage our studio. I'm not trying to jeopardize anyone else's career. But once you make, I think through what are the intended and unintended consequences for certain decisions. I do think that it's worth recognizing, look, you have made this decision, or rather you make this commitment, you're gonna have to see it through to the end.

And ironically, because I happen to be teaching this ethics class, I felt like I had, I kind of had to take it through to the end.

Christian Solorzano [26:57]

Yeah. And I've heard you mention it, mention the cost of speaking up or the cost of not speaking up. And whether you speak up or not, there is a cost. There's something that you're having to pay for, whether it's suppressing your thoughts and just holding everything in or potentially taking the risk of publishing something that maybe people might— I mean, I feel like once you publish something, it's sort of up to the public to determine for themselves how they're gonna interpret it.

So I feel like regardless, like there's some scariness to both situations either.

George Aye [27:42]

Thank you for bringing that up. I feel like that was an important component of the class that I was teaching, but also it really did come to the foreground because I think I hadn't accounted for the cost it was costing me to not have said anything for the last 20, almost 20 years. And not even recognizing that some of those things had been painful for me.

When I put that phrasing together of like, what does it cost you to not speak up? I think for a lot of folks, you may not, if you, especially if you're working in commercial design, may not recognize.

I think this phrase that I heard was so-called moral injury, the kind of harms that you experience as an employee at a lot of commercial design studios is the fact that you might end up compromising yourself and finding that that's just supposed to be normal and that there's no mourning, there's no recognition that it's happening, certainly no recompense.

But if we keep pretending it's not happening at all, if you were to ever pause, you suddenly get very overwhelmed and you go, oh shit, this is way of— you feel like you're in over your head and that there's all of this crashing down of like a house of cards of emotions around you. It can be quite unsettling.

So to say that there is a cost happening to you internally that you try not to spend too much time on ends up being kind of a hidden shadow cost that I think I want to elevate because I realize like that it's happening. It's definitely happening to me. It's probably happening to others as well.

There might be a net spreadsheet out there that works out Yes, this runs the risk of ruining a lot of very tangible externalized things, but I'm also carrying this other internal cost that hasn't been accounted for. If I continue to bury it, how do I feel about this untracked cost continuing to eat away at me? And what's funny is that after now, what, almost 3 years after that letter was published, I'm experiencing a level of healing and peace and trusting of myself that I've never had.

And sadly, like a multi-year return to some type of like normal baseline could be what most people might end up having to expect if they've gone through stuff like I wrote about in the letter or longer, it doesn't— I don't think people just like snap back because I think your baseline of what's normal is completely changed. It's very hard to know what normal is anymore after things like that.

So I feel like I'm— I didn't know I could live at a place right now where I'm like feeling as at ease with myself because I think I've been so used to it being in a cloud for so long, that was the only way I thought one was supposed to live.

Christian Solorzano [30:47]

Yeah. I remember when you published the letter and your letter, and there is another letter that someone wrote a few years back too and it was about the Type Directors Club in New York, and it was something very similar to just kind of exposing and sort of like just sharing their experience, participating in this huge corporation.

And I— and it's always interesting to speak about or to like discuss those letters with my peers, because again, like we see ourselves in the experiences that other people have gone through. And I think it sort of validates what we feel. And it kind of removes the narrative that sometimes we tell ourselves of like the little voice in our head of like, I'm crazy, or there's like no one understands what I'm going through, or I'm the problem, I'm the buzzkill during meetings.

I think that we all probably have experienced that where we, drop a bomb in the middle of a meeting and sort of kills the vibe. So yeah. Yeah.

George Aye [31:59]

I think what happens is for a lot of folks who felt resonance with that letter, a sense that I wasn't off base completely, that I didn't make it up, but that apparently the environment I was in made speaking up impossible.

And I think what I wanted to highlight was that you can afford to trust yourself more than you've been conditioned to do so, and that questioning the environment you're in might actually be the biggest determining factor whether or not you can speak up ever. You're not crazy. You don't think, you're not imagining it.

And what's scary is that a lot of the parallels of people who have experienced any, a whole bunch of different kinds of abuse, whether it's domestic partner abuse or abuse from having been inside high-pressure, very exclusive performance-based sports.

In those environments where getting in is a huge deal and the risk of getting kicked out is always present, in those environments, the risk of abuse is also very high. And your sense of like, what is good, going back to your earliest question, what's bad as a corresponding component gets so out of whack, you end up not trusting anything anymore because it would be simpler to just follow the instructions of what you've been told by the conditioning around you.

So if you were to say something, not only are you running the social risk of getting retaliation from people who hold great power over you also highlight everyone around you who you think, well, maybe they don't see it. The dirty secret here is that everybody saw it also, but nobody wants it to be called out.

Because it implicates everyone around them too. That's why I think when you're in like elite clubs or elite groups, it takes years sometimes for somebody to speak up and for it to like break a complete, like a watershed moment. And people wonder, hey, how could this have happened for so many years? How come we never heard about this before? Dude, you're lucky this happened at all.

The number of times that things like this get reported are incredibly rare, but the risk of Losing social standing with people who you've worked so hard to stay peers with is heartbreaking. You don't want to call out everyone around you, even though you may not be explicitly doing so. It kind of implies wait, you guys didn't see this either.

And what I found so tragic about the interviews I did with the alumni that I spoke to at least was that all of them said I thought it was just me. They were convinced. Just like I was, that they were the only one that thought was the problem. And they carried that story for years, just like I had years after they left and they carry it from job to job to job. That is, yeah, that's not right, man. And very common. Yeah.

Christian Solorzano [35:12]

So which, I think I speak for a lot of people, but I applaud you for doing what you did. And I want to speak a little bit about your studio and given the fact that from my perspective, a lot of the work that you are all— that you're all doing is, in my opinion, there's very few studios that are doing the kind of work that you guys are doing. And when Greater Good Studio was started, what was there, a blueprint?

How do you, how do you go from— how do you create something that is sort of— that doesn't have a lot of things to reference? Or just how'd you create your business model? Or like, just, I'm very curious about like the growing pains of doing something like that? Because I see your core values here. The status quo is unacceptable, lived experience matters, and design is transformative.

George Aye [36:21]

How—

Christian Solorzano [36:22]

Where did all that come from? And how do you, how do you craft and do all of that? I'm guessing, I mean, it's just been an ongoing process, I imagine.

George Aye [36:32]

Yeah. So this is, this is at the moment in the podcast I should like really check you and check a lot of other like misconceptions. I wanna disabuse you of the idea that George has done this or that George has done the majority of it. I've contributed a little bit.

The writing that you referenced and a lot of the writing that people are inspired by, Sarah, my co-founder, wrote. And then the majority of the examples that make what we do, that went from a lot of hand waving through to, oh, that's a real project, is coming from our team.

So much of this is barely me and the majority is others. But what's significant is our team pushes us as co-founders to actually just do the things that we promised them we were doing. So there's like a rhetorical positioning, which I think most studios would have. And what's crazy is that our team joined us Going, okay, well, let's go do the thing. We're like, well, really? He said, yeah, no, let's go do the thing that you said we're gonna do.

It's like, yeah, it's not like we say no, we were joking, but just oh shit, you really, you wanna go do it? They're like, yeah, why haven't we done it already? Oh God, you really, you're trying to hold us to, oh boy. Okay. So you really want us to go do the thing? They're like, yes. And they're impatient.

We're like, oh my God, that's so hard. Again, we weren't joking, but we're like, I didn't know you really wanted to go do the thing because it was kind of mostly just like inspirational, aspirational. That's really hard to do that. They're like, I don't care, let's do it already. So they're holding us accountable in a way that is really hardcore, quite scary at times.

And very difficult to pull off. I wouldn't quite say it's impossible, but it's very close to. Because the tensions that are directly in play in running a studio like ours that operates like a for-profit studio, but in many ways is like a nonprofit organization with a clear social mission, is a challenging business to operate.

To go back to something you said earlier about like, were there precedents? So when we were looking, I know even early like 2008, 2009, 2010, we had seen a handful of examples. There was probably like 2 or 3 projects that I remember seeing. There was one around like the future of fish that I think was like maybe funded through the Packard Foundation. I don't even remember now who the designers were.

A couple of design studios, maybe one in the UK, one in maybe Australia, one in the US, like again, a handful. There's like 5 or things that we could even point to like, oh, like this, like this is kind of what we wanna do. It was very scary to want to do something that didn't look like it had a lot of clear guidelines. And yet, and maybe this is obvious, but that's kind of what made it attractive.

Wanted to do something that wasn't that clearly understood yet or maybe clearly defined has a great appeal to, the likes of Sarah and I. There was also a bit of a motivating factor in that if I think if we just waited for it to get clearer, I personally know I would get really frustrated and mad watching someone else do it.

Do it badly and not be able to like get involved more. I wanted to be directly involved so I could take some of the responsibility of wanting to do it better if it was bad.

And I think that idea of wanting to contribute and refine, contribute, refine continues to my, to my, at least in me, a very strong desire to wanting to keep doing this work. I just wanna get another try at it because I know it could be better. But nowadays, 2024, we maintain something. I don't know, Christian, if you've seen this, but we maintain a database of design studios like ours, because I want to make it clear actually that we're not that unusual anymore.

And the whole point of it is that we were lucky, and I think, we also contributed to wanting to help shape a field as it was happening. But it really can't remain a thing that is dedicated to a handful of design studios. And that we end up being like the 1 of 5, 1 of 10 people that you think about, but rather we are a dot in this galaxy of lots and lots of contributing studios, organizations, nonprofits, departments.

The number of design studios that are inside local government, not, I wouldn't say it's like every day is growing, but like it is definitely accelerating in a way that was so radical and so cool that when I left IDEO and went to the Chicago Transit Authority, that was like my year out of commercial design. I would have killed for anything like what we have today, where like the Philadelphia studio, Philadelphia, Cities of Philadelphia has a service design studio right now, as I believe.

I think there's like half a dozen, maybe a dozen cities funded through Bloomberg Philanthropies that are going to have full-blown innovation teams. Like it's happening all the time. That to me is remarkable, but also says this is a thing that is definitely not going away. And I feel so lucky in terms of like, I'm a Buddhist, so maybe I think about this in kind of karmic ways, but like I could have been born at a time when I could meet this design movement when it happened.

Because I had, being born when I was, missed the other ones. And it wasn't contributing during Memphis, during the Bauhaus, through any of the big movements that we talk about, modernism. I missed all those. And there's all the things you read about. But I came up through this and oh, I could actually, I could actually be it. I could be a player in this.

That's so cool, dude. Yeah. I mean, I could be part of this moment right now. And I feel like that's where we are. If you wanna work in design in the social sector, this is our time when we are doing radical things almost just because no one's tried it before. Yeah. Feels punk.

I don't know anything about punk, but it feels kind of punk in the way that if you were trying to do, and if a music analogy were to continue, like if Nirvana had not done their thing, that whole grunge movement, which again, I barely understand, might not have happened. Or like when Public Enemy came up or when, like DJs learning how to understand how to like integrate breakbeats. Like something that nobody had really tried or like mushed together.

Meant, could have meant the entire branch of music history might never have existed. So here's a time right now where in our careers, I'm 48 now. I came up and it's like, okay, maybe I could be, I could meet this moment. With the work that we can do. And maybe this will be where I like put my, place my bet as it were. That's very fortunate. That has nothing to do with us, much more with timing. And I just feel very lucky.

Christian Solorzano [44:01]

And what are your thoughts around, 'cause I think over the last maybe 4 or so years, like I've seen an increase in, like there's always been buzzwords, but I think today even more so, there's a lot of emphasis put on DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Accessibility. And again, I'm just very suspicious of these, huge corporations that, utilize these buzzwords to maybe come across like virtue signal or come across as, caring about certain things, when in reality I feel like it's just because it's trendy.

Whereas I don't know, with a smaller studio, I feel like it's a little bit different because there's less— I don't know, I attended an Adobe conference a few years ago, and the amount of focus that was placed upon the buzzwords that were happening at that moment, I don't know, I just don't fall for. So, I'm curious about what your overall sentiments are around, the industry and just Whether you feel, yeah, just how do you feel about it?

Do you have any critiques, anything that you're hopeful for? What's your assessment on graphic design or just design in general as it stands today?

George Aye [45:26]

Christian, these are not small questions. I think in our business, focus so much on wanting to understand and meet social needs as they happen. Has necessitated us taking quite seriously those trends as you described. And in many cases, at least for me and maybe my co-founder, we have a strong sense that we weren't, we didn't, we weren't trained in this language. We weren't working every day in this work. We were, 2 designers working in commercial design.

And while the feeling of being an imposter is lessened, I don't know if it's fully gone away in the way that if we had, if we'd worked in nonprofits our whole careers, maybe we wouldn't feel this. So we have a certain reverence, I guess, or care for wanting to treat those words and those things as you described as trends. We kind of take it fairly seriously.

And, just like a lot of folks after 2020 found that there was an intense focus on some words more than others that prior to— we joked about how when we do our design work, we were using human-centered design and our process as a Trojan horse for getting to equity.

And then after 2020, people were asking for equity upfront and didn't care about human-centered design. What I think is interesting now is that I think it's getting pushed into the background again and having to mask itself again. Because I think the trend these days is Black Lives Matter, JK, not really. Because now we don't have to care anymore, because I'm not sure if we really cared, but we kind of had to care. So we had to appear to be for it, for it to be important.

But now that the attention and scrutiny has left, maybe we can afford to go back to our old ways. So I think if the critique around it being trendy and therefore fleeting, I think that critique is fair of a lot of places, whether that's in the design industry or your corporate clients or small studios for sure.

But I think for us at least, we were quite motivated to want to learn what some of those terms meant. And it's quite important for our work at least to stay on top of a lot of evolving language around what social structures look like, what social movements look like.

Because in many cases, the projects we work on happen only because a lot of people in a lot of movements have worked their asses off, risked their lives to get to a point where someone would actually pay money towards doing something about it. So we don't tend to treat it as being necessarily— we're not eye-rolling of like, oh, here's another one, but rather, what's the history of this term?

Christian Solorzano [48:30]

Yeah.

George Aye [48:31]

How's it been used? How's it been co-opted? How's it perhaps being misused today? And this is the part maybe where our studio maybe spends a lot of time thinking about is, what is our role in either ameliorating some of these issues? Or are we also contributing to the noise?

Because I think as a studio being used to be brought in the context that you described of like fads and fleeting support and constant marginalization of people, is there a risk that our studio provides cover for some of these powerful people to appear to be causing helping?

Christian Solorzano [49:12]

Yeah.

George Aye [49:13]

Or are we causing them to mask the harm that they're already doing and continue to do?

Christian Solorzano [49:18]

Yeah.

George Aye [49:19]

But only better because of design. I think that we have to ask those questions as a studio that's called Greater Good. But I think it's relevant that we talk about that in design field at large, because design is an accelerant to whatever it's attached to. So when we go back to questions around what is good, you could make a beautiful, design output that might be attached to something quite heinous and you are left wondering, do I put this in my portfolio or not?

Christian Solorzano [49:49]

Yeah.

George Aye [49:50]

Do I take accountability for the harm this has caused? Do I, do I let myself get into these conversations in the first place or will there be some other thing that will prevent me from getting in those contracts? I don't know. But I feel like we kind of can't afford not to take it seriously in our business. And also we learn a lot when we do.

Christian Solorzano [50:10]

Yeah. You shared a story in one of your talks about the electronic cigarette Juul. That's how you pronounce it. And how that was designed as a way to get people to not smell like cigarettes, maybe cut back on smoking.

George Aye [50:26]

Yeah, I believe it was a smoking cessation product.

Christian Solorzano [50:29]

Yeah. And then eventually, like once, the team starts introducing like mango flavored and creating very flashy packaging, they realized that kids are now wanting to smoke the electronic cigarettes because they look cool and they're collectible and different colors. And I think that showcases like an example of like design maybe not asking the right questions of why do we need to introduce flavors all of a sudden, or why? I don't know.

George Aye [51:00]

Yeah, I mean, I think, it's perhaps unfair of me to highlight such an obvious example as that, but, until I had heard of it wasn't obvious to me. But also when you look back on things, you go, oh, how did they miss it?

Christian Solorzano [51:12]

Yeah.

George Aye [51:12]

It's quite easy to miss things because you are propelled to think, well, I'm lucky to do this work, maybe it'll help. But I think there's something particularly insidious about working in the design industry as it gets closer to working on social issues, which is you hope you have this in erring hope that maybe what you're doing will help the greater good. You really do.

Okay, nothing to do with our studio's name, just you're hoping that it'll be, it'll be better. So that optimism is a powerful thing that I hope we'd never lose as an industry, but to be mindful of how it gets co-opted by financiers, by investors, by people who give zero fucks about the work at all, are focused on maximizing the return on their profit.

When they invest in you to not pause and check, is this next upcoming meeting decision, whatever we have, this fork in the road, is it taking us further from that optimism or is it getting us to the more cynical place? You have to have a mechanism for checking. Because if you don't, you'll be suddenly finding yourself going, oh my gosh, look at this. I had no idea, but oh my God, we have millions of people that we were now addicted to our product.

When we were trying to make something that was supposed to reduce net addicts. And you can't go whoopsie, but you can when you have one of those shareholder meetings and say, look, we've made a, this, we've made a strategic decision. We are no longer pursuing that investment. Unfortunately, if you don't want to be part of this project anymore, we would understand you taking your funding away.

Yeah, I don't even know how many times people really practice saying out loud the scary thing, which might cause, as we talked about, reputational harm, or the thing that you, if you perhaps wanna swallow it and say, look, we'll be fine. Doing some accounting for the cost of speaking up or the cost of maybe if we don't, has to be a worthwhile part of your time, especially if you're a leader in design.

And I think the folks who were running Juul at the time probably were not prepared or had maybe not the right advisors, if I'm being generous, about having those serious conversations about— goes beyond optimism. It just goes right into naivety and possibly actual straight up negligence.

Christian Solorzano [53:35]

Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. And I know we're approaching the end of our conversation here, but I just have a few more questions and you describe yourself as a pissed-off optimist, which I really like. I like to think of myself as a pissed-off optimist too. So it's nice to be in good company. What are— what's pissing you off lately?

George Aye [53:59]

Oh my God. It's hard not to think about— we have an election coming up at the end of the year and the chance of a person who could cause the end of democracy being a viable candidate for the Republican Party is terrifying. And the debate right now of people focusing on whether or not Biden should drop out of the race, and yet somehow not talking about the near-constant lying that the other candidate just gave, feels to me something to be worth pissed off about.

It's very concerning that we have that we have that be a realistic chance of that person winning again. It's both not only upsetting me, but it's quite scary. So yeah, that's on my mind. Has nothing to do with design per se. But yeah, that's fairly upsetting.

Christian Solorzano [54:56]

And what are you optimistic about?

George Aye [54:58]

I remain optimistic about the clients that we meet. I have found pretty consistently, every once in a while I'll meet a new client or actually even old clients who we work with again. I go, oh, thank God, so glad you exist. I'm not quite ready to like end it all. It's not like quite that bad, like self-harm bad. But there are times when I go, what is the fucking point? What, why are we even trying? Everything's completely broken.

This thing is, there's no way out of this. And then I get reminded from a client who is not that far gone. It's still doing it. It's still remaining hopeful. And I, and I've, I'm so grateful that they exist because they really inspire me. And they, and I'm reminded that this work, this work is really important. So that constant back and forth, I think, is a, is a, is a constant part of the work that we do as a studio.

I think balancing tensions between staying profitable, and not compromising ourselves, trying to push our practice forward and then being tempered by how difficult it is in a practical way. That's a lot about what this work is about, is being caught between those 2 extremes. So being a pissed-off optimist, I think, is part of the job that it takes to make social change.

Christian Solorzano [56:19]

Okay. And then for the For the listeners that are perhaps younger into their career or considering design, what is your advice for someone that is brand new to this industry? What's something that you wish someone had told you maybe when you were younger?

George Aye [56:39]

What's— Oh boy. I would certainly feel like you should get enough either practice or input or inspiration around your craft as you feel is necessary to feel confident. But recognize that there is so much beyond this discipline that could get hidden from you because we are so obsessed with this hustle.

That you might miss so much of what actually makes not only your work better, but why it should matter at all that could get lost in your education, could get lost in your training. So I would urge basically, certainly, yes, surround yourself by people who can help you improve your craft.

And then take a fucking big old step back and say, how narrow is my field of view? And how narrow are the people around me? How much do they look like the people I've been told to look to? And start to wonder, why am I— why did they— why is this such a monocultural group? Where am I going to find these relationships and people and cultures and inspiration that have nothing to do with design?

Christian Solorzano [57:54]

Yeah.

George Aye [57:55]

And there's a lot more to do with just people and the work that's out in the world. How will I incorporate that into my daily or weekly exposure? And I think it will be you'll see a lot more of the world that way. So I feel very lucky that every day now, that's part of what I get to do is I see all these other experiences, professions, struggles.

Where design is at this point a much smaller role in my life than it used to be. And I feel so much more exposed to points of view that I probably could have probably never seen for a long time. So I feel in general, this is maybe the big takeaway from it. I feel very lucky to get to do this work. So thank you, Christian, for letting me speak to all of this so far.

Christian Solorzano [58:50]

Do you still—

George Aye [58:51]

This went by in a flash, by the way.

Christian Solorzano [58:52]

Yeah. Do you still design? Do you still get open up Adobe programs and mess around with type, color?

George Aye [58:58]

I think there's a reason why I shouldn't be doing that. I think there was a debate a while ago whether I should still keep a license. I very rarely do that work. Not only do we pay a team to do it really well, I might be at this point a bit of a liability if I would open those up, open those to a lot, spend a lot of time writing. A lot of emails. And a lot of, yeah, just a lot of writing.

Christian Solorzano [59:25]

And then outside of Greater Good Studio design, all this stuff, what do you do for fun? How do you, how do you spend your time when you're not, when you're not working? What's something about you that we wouldn't be able to gather from just Googling you on the internet?

George Aye [59:42]

Well, I have 3 kids, so that takes up an enormous amount of our time. I am trying to do a little bit of, I do a little bit of cooking whenever I can. And we have a dog now, which adds a whole bunch more chaos. To the house. I got recently got a motorcycle. That was really fun.

Christian Solorzano [60:02]

Oh, I saw on your, on your Instagram, I think you—

George Aye [60:05]

Yeah, that is, that is an unbelievably consistent source of joy. It's so great because I dreamed about a motorcycle for a long time. And at this point, I just feel like I, there's so many, so many things to do, particularly with our kids and trying to Give them a stable household that I'm usually kept on my feet trying to get everything, just trying to get all those things, keep all those things in balance. Cool.

Christian Solorzano [60:33]

And then last question, what's something that you love about Chicago? What are some of your favorite spots?

George Aye [60:38]

I can't speak to anything recent because I never go out, and when we do, it's usually— I'm usually exhausted. I do remember though, I didn't know much about Chicago till I moved.

But I remember my very first work trip. I had gone to Los Angeles to something called SIGGRAPH. Do you know about SIGGRAPH? It's the nerdiest conference. It's all computer graphics. So it's all like, people writing papers on skin deformation or snow products or a whole bunch of like stuff, all tech and computer visual graphics. But I remember kind of flying back from it and looking out the window and feeling the first type of like I'm like, I miss the city.

And I think, oh, I don't know if I've ever felt that anywhere before.

And that was like the first year I thought, oh, I'm, I think I'm like really falling in love with this city. So it's been over 20 years and I, and I love it here. And I think it's because it's, it accepted me. I also feel like had we tried running Greater Good Studio out of any other place, I don't know if we could have made it. It really is a very special place to do the kind of work we're doing.

The right mix of nonprofits, the right size, the living costs, all of it kind of came together to be, to me, like just the right birthplace for a studio like ours. So I feel like very grateful to the city. I Love her very dearly. And yeah, cool. Feel like this was just the right place to have for it to be the origin for our place.

Christian Solorzano [62:15]

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the conversation. For the listener, we'll include George's links and all that stuff in the description for the episode. I encourage everyone to follow you and connect with you on LinkedIn. I love seeing your posts, like your comments on other people's posts. I feel like I learn so much about you from your reactions to other people, what they write. So definitely add George on LinkedIn.

George Aye [62:46]

Thanks, Christian. Well, this was really, this was really enjoyable. Thanks so much for the great question. Thanks for doing the research you did. It really did make me feel quite heard. Thank you.

Christian Solorzano [63:03]

Another amazing conversation. Thank you so much for listening until the end. To learn more about the show and the Chicago Graphic Design Club, visit us on the web at www.chicagographicdesign.club. Thank you, and we'll talk soon. Goodbye. Bye.