AlysaBuchanan

What were you doing before you came to NC State?

I got my Bachelors in Visual Communication Design with a minor in Marketing. I sought out the marketing minor because while I felt like I was doing good work in branding and print and websites, I wasn’t sure that what I was designing was making an impact. Back when I got my Bachelors, we weren’t talking about UI/UX. I’d never heard those terms. The only thing I knew close to research was marketing research so I minored in marketing and those were some of my favorite classes. I knew that I was not the best visual designer but I knew that I was really good at researching and telling stories and identifying audiences and I think that’s what gave me a ledge over my peers. And then I started interning at Pandora Jewelry and I was on the visual merchandising team taking my visual design skills and putting them into retail spaces and my understanding of human behavior and marketing and the psychology of buying habits. I left Pandora after three and a half years and I became a freelancer. I focused on small businesses, entrepreneurs, schools, and churches because I went from corporate and I felt like I wasn’t making a big difference.

Why did you want to go back to graduate school?

I really missed working on a team. I missed working with other people and I knew that I wanted to teach. I loved mentoring and talking to young designers so I looked around for master’s programs. When I got here, I got to TA my first semester which was great. It was a challenging two years. I was commuting an hour and fifteen minutes one way. My husband was deployed to Afghanistan so our relationship was long distance. But the thing that made up for those challenges was working with students. I was also a design instructor at the college’s Design Camp for teens. So when I finished I knew I wanted to teach, but I wanted to get more experience in the industry before I went back to the classroom. But then I actually fell in love with working in industry. I don’t know if I’m going to go back to teach, but I’m really enjoying being out in the world right now.

You were talking about wanting to make an impact. How you think about doing that in industry, which I think sometimes can be really tricky.

I still have a huge passion for my thesis project. I’d like to turn it into a nonprofit. There was so much I didn’t know about software development before writing that project and I found that being an industry has given me an appreciation for it. It’s building my confidence to actually make my final project something tangible out in the real world. I love the diversity of the people that I work with, not just their race and their gender and their age but also their expertise. I learn from them and I love teaching them. I’m not teaching students but I’m still teaching people about the power of design and research. I’ve actually found a lot of personal growth and having to advocate for myself, advocate for my work, stand up for myself.

You’ve designed in every type of space: retail design, marketing, user research, interfaces. You’ve worked in companies and independently. How has your understanding of what design is and what design can do changed over your career?

I first started to design at my technical high school but it was called “Desktop Publishing.” It was all about making physical magazines. It started as visual design and then it turned into web design. Then it became design as research, thinking about sales, marketing, culture, and politics. I use “UX” and “design research” interchangeably because to me, it’s all of that. I knew that this career would always be different and always be changing. It’s always engaging because I can’t do the same thing every day. I can’t imagine not being a designer.

Alberto Rigau

Alberto Rigau (MGDX ‘09) serves as Co-chair for AIGA’s Design Educators Community. He engages design through the crafting and conceptualization of brands, exhibits, way-finding systems, publications, books, architectural collaborations, and photographic stories.

“There are five of us in my studio: one interior designer, one industrial designer, two graphic designers, and me. We need to find common ways to talk. We should be teaching students how to open up their thinking about what design can be.”

You seem very comfortable moving from an illustration to an installation from something more architectural to something content driven. You seem to have no boundaries. Where did that come from?

After I graduated from college, I was feeling depressed because the only work I could get were flyers and posters. I did a lot of crappy work. That Christmas, my father, who is an architect and was the Dean of an architecture school, came to me and said, “This year, we’re giving you a special gift: you’re going to go spend time in Spain with my friend, Juli Capella. He runs a firm called Capella Architecture.” If you think I have no sense of boundaries, this guy was trained as an architect, but his first venture was founding an architecture magazine. So he was a self-trained graphic designer for many years, then went back into architecture and started designing malls and hotels. He has written like 60 books. He’s designed everything from houses to multi complex hotels to furniture. No boundaries. When I got there, he said to me, “I know you think you’re coming to stay at my studio, but that’s not what I want for you.” Then he gave me a list and said “for the next four weeks, every few days, I’m going to move you from one studio to another, and you’re going to see what all of these designers are doing.” And over those four weeks, I visited a studio that was an expert in food packaging and then a branding consultancy. I got to see the guy who designed the mascot for the Barcelona Olympics.

I was surrounded by all these people who truly had no boundaries and I knew that’s how I wanted to work. I found myself in a place where everything could truly be designed. It’s not a cliché! It’s true. I was surrounded by people who were doing it.

I think this way of working is emblematic of the evolution of design. These silos between different design disciplines are much more porous than we let on. Do you see it that way?

I’m seeing it professionally, but I’m not seeing it academically. I always loved the “swing studios” at the College of Design because the idea that a graphic designer should be encouraged to take an industrial design course is fantastic. There are five of us in my studio: one interior designer, one industrial designer, two graphic designers, and me. We need to find common ways to talk. We should be teaching students how to open up their thinking about what design can be. This is about thinking about design as not singular objects but part of a system.

Right. We need to teach that marketing is not the only way to do design in a bigger company. I have found that if I go in through marketing, I will not be able to innovate or change as much. But if I go through facilities departments or financial departments, they have a day-to-day reality of needs and executions. Then we’re not just putting a band-aid on something but getting to the real problem.

Reneé

Seward

(MGXD

‘07)

is Associate Professor in the Communication Design Program, at the University of Cincinnati, DAAP College. She is Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of See Word Design.

You got a Bachelor’s in graphic design in 2002 and then in 2005, you started here at NC State. What were you doing after you graduated and then what was the desire to go back to school?

At the University of Cincinnati, we’re required to go out and co-op and my last co-op was at a studio in downtown Cincinnati and they gave me my first job. We did design work for Nickelodeon and Disney. We were doing in-store signage for Target. But we also got to do product licensing where we could develop identities for different products and get royalties back on that. I loved it. It was great as a first job but I felt that a lot of things were taking me off track in terms of being the designer that I wanted to be. I felt like I was applying graphics to stuff that nobody needs and it bothered me that it didn’t have a level of social impact or service to it. I don’t know, maybe I was just burnt out on clients, but there was a lot of discussion at the time in my head around images and what images mean. As a Black designer, if they asked me to make an angel for something, my first stab was a Black angel, you know? Then they’d be like “Wow, can we lighten this up this little bit?” So I was getting tired of those discussions as well. And I needed to get back to the heart of design and figuring out how to make a social impact.