08/20/2024
Doug Powell and I met through AIGA | the professional association for design what seems a lifetime ago. We were part of leading a movement dubbed "Design for Good" with some folks who have become friends for life. Here are a few of the leaders who sat around those late night tables, for the better part of a decade, nursing wine and bourbon and ideas and then caffeine and pastries until morning light found us still kicking hard at tires that, in my mind, would conceive a bold and humble role for design in the discourse around how humans should be treated:
James Hersick
Laurel Webster
Jenny Price
Lennie Gray Mowris
Frances Yllana
Justin Ahrens
Some of us wrote and wrote and rewrote and others built planes in the air, launched, failed, recalibrated and tried again—the way you do when you believe in what you are working toward. We talked a lot about "love" and we questioned how we show up in community. One of my favorite words in the world is "indefatigable"—and this group of people remain indefatigable champions of people.
Recently, Doug asked me to have a conversation with him—a sort of homecoming (to quote a song)—in the presence of some remote recording devices. I immediately forgot we were documenting our conversation and we just... talked.
Doug is in the second season of producing "This is a Prototype—The Design Leadership Podcast". The series is full of insights and interesting ways of looking at the way the featured designers come to understand how to live with meaning in the world they try to define.
Have a listen—and share this out! Doug is doing some relevant work here and I'd love to see this series blow up.
(photo by Mike Marques)
Throughout this season of the series I’ve been speaking with leaders who have used their design superpowers in community and civic leadership roles, and in this
