When AIGA Eye on Design vanished overnight, it exposed a troubling lack of stewardship in preserving our industry’s legacy. How can we ensure our design history endures in the digital age?
AIGA has been a disaster ever since the internet came on the scene, despite many well-meaning efforts to save it from itself. It's not just Eye on Design that they torched, but every bit of thinking and writing (and money) that was casually entrusted to them over the last thirty years. I don't blame AIGA, though – I blame us for expecting that AIGA could somehow be both the professional and intellectual steward of a poorly defined (and dissolving) discipline.
What do "real" disciplines do? They create and fund centers at universities that have the institutional infrastructure to take care of shit over a long period of time. They index their writing so that it can be retrieved through interconnected libraries, which are now mostly digital. They don't ignore their university programs and let them become ATM machines for flagging schools and departments. Their professional organizations establish standard, advocate for their professions, and connect institutions.
I don't think it's too late to rethink how we take care of the knowledge and discourse of the last thirty years. AIGA is not the answer – no one thing is the answer.
AIGA used to employee a brilliant archivist, Heather Strelecki. I suspect if she hadn’t been “restructured out” they might have pursued other options and handled this differently. In my years there I know we cared a lot about preserving design and investing in the discourse around it. I don’t know the organization’s current finances but am sad to see how poorly they handled Eye on Design, which had exactly the type of online community and readership that we wished we could have built when we relaunched aiga.org (c. 2011). Massive kudos to Perrin and everyone who made it the success it was. I’m so sorry to see what’s become of it.
I noticed a long time ago that AIGA's archives were disappearing, notably their Design for Democracy initiative. Items just disappeared, so the trajectory of the project was no longer complete.
AIGA has been a disaster ever since the internet came on the scene, despite many well-meaning efforts to save it from itself. It's not just Eye on Design that they torched, but every bit of thinking and writing (and money) that was casually entrusted to them over the last thirty years. I don't blame AIGA, though – I blame us for expecting that AIGA could somehow be both the professional and intellectual steward of a poorly defined (and dissolving) discipline.
What do "real" disciplines do? They create and fund centers at universities that have the institutional infrastructure to take care of shit over a long period of time. They index their writing so that it can be retrieved through interconnected libraries, which are now mostly digital. They don't ignore their university programs and let them become ATM machines for flagging schools and departments. Their professional organizations establish standard, advocate for their professions, and connect institutions.
I don't think it's too late to rethink how we take care of the knowledge and discourse of the last thirty years. AIGA is not the answer – no one thing is the answer.
AIGA used to employee a brilliant archivist, Heather Strelecki. I suspect if she hadn’t been “restructured out” they might have pursued other options and handled this differently. In my years there I know we cared a lot about preserving design and investing in the discourse around it. I don’t know the organization’s current finances but am sad to see how poorly they handled Eye on Design, which had exactly the type of online community and readership that we wished we could have built when we relaunched aiga.org (c. 2011). Massive kudos to Perrin and everyone who made it the success it was. I’m so sorry to see what’s become of it.
I noticed a long time ago that AIGA's archives were disappearing, notably their Design for Democracy initiative. Items just disappeared, so the trajectory of the project was no longer complete.