CHI 2005 | Development Consortium

April 2-7 | Portland, Oregon, USATowards Knowledge Building in Professional Groups
John Zapolski
National Board Member, AIGA999 Steiner Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
J_zapolski@yahoo.com
415/867-2896

ABSTRACT

SUCCESSES AND FAILURES

In this submission for the CHI05 Development forum, I
reflect on my experience leading the Experience Designcommunity of interest of the American Institute of Graphic
Arts and suggest that the focus of the group needs to shift inorder to successfully accomplish our mission.

Looking back over our accomplishments these last sixyears, I believe we have primarily tried – with mixed
success – to do three things. Firstly, we have functioned asa leading-edge collective of practitioners looking at how
design practice is evolving, and trying to feed that back into
the general AIGA membership. This I would describe as aninternal think-tank function for the larger AIGA, and to thisend we have influenced change in the organization’s
national agenda and helped produce a more broadlyfocused and inclusive organization.

Author Keywords

Development Forum, AIGA ED, User Experience ,Professional Organizations, Design Communities of InterestBACKGROUND

Over the last year and a half, as chair of the American
Institute for Graphic Arts' (AIGA) Experience Design (ED)national community of interest, I have put much effort into
thinking about problems in contemporary design practiceand our organization's attempts at addressing them: what
we have tried to do in the past and what we have actuallydone; the set of people we have tried to serve and should try
to serve; what the most pressing and relevant problems
facing the community are; what activities we should
undertake to address those challenges; and how we shouldorganize to effectively work towards their resolution.

Secondly, we have tried to crystallize a community toadvance understanding of user experience. In this way, too,
we have been successful. We now have over 2500
practitioners and students, and unofficially helped spur thedevelopment of other groups with narrower and more
specialized objectives (among them AIfIA, IxDG, andUXNet). While these other groups certainly deserve a lot ofcredit for their community building efforts as well, without
a doubt there is certainly a much stronger, and moreaccessible, community of similar-minded practitioners
today than there was before the AIGA ED group camealong.

Our group began in 1998 as an informal gathering ofleading designers at a retreat called the Advance for Design,intended to draw together a small, committed group ofpractitioners intent on investigating new trends in design
and technology. A second gathering was held a year later,
after which time the group was formalized as a communityof interest within the AIGA, a 90-year-old professionalorganization for communication designers.

Far less successfully, we have attempted to build tools thatcan be taken up in everyday use and discussion by design
practitioners and design leaders wanting to expand design¹s
potential, with a special emphasis on expanding its strategic
impact. We have probably come closest to this goal
through our case study initiative (in part through ourcollaboration with ACM SIGCHI and SIGGRAPH), which
has resulted in 38 case studies documented and available
for download on the AIGA website. Undoubtedly, though,we can do more to be successful in achieving this goal, as
the profession continues to severely lack a formalized bodyof knowledge about its practice.

And so began an organized effort to build a community oflike-minded people from design and related disciplines
interested in advancing understanding of user experience
practice.

LESSONS LEARNED

Considering the successes we have experienced inrelationship to one another, it has become clear to me thatthe most productive use of the Experience Design has
heretofore been to serve the needs of the larger AIGA. We

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CHI 2005, April 2–7, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA.
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April 2-7 | Portland, Oregon, USA

have been successful by looking for ways to shape andadvance the mission of the organization and serve the needsof its members, and we have been least successful inattempting to move beyond the boundaries of the immediateneed of our organizational home, in attempting to create
tools and products useful in the practice of design. That,unfortunately, is exactly backwards.

foundational knowledge of design, to make basic designaccessible to more people.
To do that effectively, we need to build tools that makeknowledge of design easier to acquire. I believe a more
effective approach to doing this would be to createorganizations that build knowledge products of these andsell them to design consumers. Instead of deriving revenue
from membership dues, these organizations would maintainthemselves through fee revenue attached to the products
they sell. The effect of such an approach is to create more
direct alignment between the needs of the organization andthe needs of its constituents. In short, they have an
incentive to be useful, in order to compete directly for thedollars of the larger market opened up to them, beyond that
their members.

PRODUCTS, NOT EVENTSIn order for professional organizations to stay relevant totheir constituents in the future, they must recognize thelarger ecosystem of services and organizations available totheir members. Rather than look at their membership in
isolation, as a stable entity to which need be deliveredservices, I believe they need to start from the outside – fromthe needs of real people in the real world – and work theirway in to consider the role of the organization in fulfillingthose needs.

Case studies could be an example of one such “knowledgeproduct”. Case studies have been one way that other fields
have codified knowledge from problems encountered byleading edge practitioners and made them interesting andrelevant to a wider audience. As an imperfect but
nonetheless useful reference point, Harvard Business
School produces approximately 350 business cases peryear. And their incentive for doing so is great – they sell anaverage of 6 million cases per year. At around $6 each, thatmakes for a $36million revenue stream. Now of course, Iwould not argue that the appeal of design cases would makefor a market of a similar size. And neither am I saying thatthe intention of professional organizations should be tobring in revenues on the order of $36million. But if theintent of these organizations is to influence practice, tomake it better, more excellent, more impactful, I do believe
they need to find ways to get their practices out into theworld at the order at a scale of reach comparable to thosethat business cases enjoy.

For no matter how altruistic a professional organization’s
mission, it inevitably is beholden to its funding model. For
the AIGA and the like, that means that every activity
undertaken, whether done so consciously or not, needs tosupport the goal of getting existing members to “re-up”
their membership. The organization’s revenue comesalmost entirely from membership dues and from annual
member conferences. The underlying promise offered tomembers in exchange for their dues and fees is a sense ofcommunity – a place to fraternize and compare notes withcolleagues of similar mind.
Hosting events, with the corresponding discount given toexisting members, thus become the most effective way for
professional organizations to encourage members to join
and re-subscribe. Looking at this from a customer point ofview, the point of view of the member, the underlying
promise seems to be an opportunity to belong. A chance tohave a home, a place – whether virtual or real – to go toconnect with colleagues. And therein lies the problem. In
our hyper-connected world of social networks, webcommunities, mailing lists, and meet-ups, we now simply
have too many places to belong.

CONCLUSION

It is a truism to say that all institutions initially founded toserve a vital and noble purpose inevitably end up concernedmostly with furthering their own existence. Professional
design organizations, though sincerely intent on promoting
better design in the world, are locked in a trap ofmaintaining the size of their membership and thecorresponding revenue garnered from dues. To truly serve
their missions, however, organizations must think beyond
justifying their existence through annual conferences andother events and create a product which can be marketed toa broader constituency. It may be the only way to avoid
irrelevance.

Stepping back from that, I believe it is useful to ask again
about the larger purpose intended by our various
professional associations. For the AIGA, it is “furtheringexcellence in communication design as a broadly-defined
discipline, strategic tool for business and cultural force.”
The subsequent discussion, then, is about, how exactly to
do that. If we see “furthering excellence” as synonymouswith innovation, then we can say that the challenge is totake the practices and characteristics of high-end design,
now accessible primarily only to those at the leading edgeof practice, and attempt to find ways to make only the mostimportant and functional benefits available to more people,
at a cheaper price point.1 In other words, the task at hand is
to create a means for consolidating and sharing

REFERENCES

1. Silverthorne, Sean, and Christensen, Clayton. Are
Crummy Products Your Next Growth Opportunity?
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=3437&t=innovation

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