AIGA EMERGE 2.0

In July 2017, AIGA Minnesota was awarded with its third AIGA Innovate grant to engage in a pivotal partnership with AIGA's Diversity & Inclusion Task Force. 

The objective: to grow and expand EMERGE to reach new, more diverse audiences, existing members, and prospective members. EMERGE 2.0 will provide inclusive strategies that enable underrepresented groups and give all emerging designers the opportunity to flourish. The goal of the expanded EMERGE initiative is to engage participating chapters and communities in the key areas of employment, growth, leadership, entrepreneurship, and life skills. 

The unified effort developed by chapters for chapters culminates in AIGA's 2018 EMERGE Awareness Week taking place across all chapters September 24 - October 3.  

THE COLLABORATION AT A GLANCE

To achieve the goals of EMERGE with authenticity in our purpose, we had to be intentional, inclusive and collaborative. Over a 9 month period, a diverse team of AIGA leadership across the country, led by Jenny Price and Katrin Loss from AIGA Minnesota, used virtual tools to coordinate our teams to collaborate towards a solid 30/60/90 strategic plan to empower chapters to engage their communities in EMERGE Awareness week in September 2018. We did this with 28 chapter leaders during 2 virtual workshops that concluded in December 2017, followed by 5 months of work by leaders from our original workshop teams who were chosen to form development teams to reinvent the brand and create the playbook to share out to every AIGA chapter. All of the deliverables were created so that chapters would be empowered to collaborate and execute on driving awareness and engagement in AIGA's EMERGE Awareness week in September 2018.

Click here to see a short video of our presentation to the AIGA Leadership Retreat in Baltimore.

MY FIRST ROLE: VIRTUAL WORKSHOP FACILITATOR

At the end of Summer 2017, I was honored to be asked to lead one of the 5 virtual workshop teams as facilitator. As one of the facilitators, I guided our group during 2 virtual workshops using Zoom, Mural and Google Drive as our collaborative tools.

During the first workshop, each team explored its initial thoughts around the why's and why not's behind engaging our assigned user persona, which was based on information from the Design Census initiated by AIGA and Google.

Between the first and second workshop, each team member was tasked to formulate questions to gather insights from real designers that fit within our assigned user persona. For the second workshop, we distilled the insights found, and worked together to formulate ideas into 30/60/90 day plans to populate the EMERGE Awareness Week (and general programming) playbook.

Click here to see the in-progress checkpoint video presented to AIGA national leadership in January 2018.

MY SECOND ROLE: BRAND TEAM LEAD

After a short holiday break, participants from the workshops were recruited to form the development teams to create the new brand (and digital brand guide), content for the playbook, design of the playbook (and subsequently the website). 

I was asked to join, and lead the Brand team. Together with Raksa Yin, Taylor Bingham and Lucy Bennett, we created a new brand, brand assets and templates and digital brand guide to inform chapters on how to execute the new EMERGE brand for better organizational alignment and to best promote and represent diversity in our membership. 

Between January and June 2018, we met weekly via Zoom to share progress and collaborate towards a cohesive, purposeful and powerful new brand to support our chapters and leadership. As brand team lead I provided the framework, platform ad guidance for our team's emerging designers to shine, while collaborating with the other team leads to align all of our efforts around our unified purpose. 

Credit to Raksa Yin, the designer whose new identity for EMERGE was chosen, developed and received with high applause as we unveiled the brand and all of the new materials.

See the process video I produced for presentation at the AIGA National Leadership Retreat in Baltimore in June 2018 below.

AIGA EMERGE Team List