Design for Good + Gut Checks + Seeing Power with George Aye — DT101 E50

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Today’s guest is George Aye, the co-founder of Greater Good Studio and an Adjunct Full Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We talk about creating a design studio driven by social impact, how to make facing the hard, ethical questions part of how a team functions, and what it means to design and lead with a deep awareness of power and its absence. Dawan Stanford, is your podcast host.</span></p> <p><strong>Show Summary</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">George’s path to design began in England, where he studied mechanical engineering at university before being fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to work with IDEO in their Chicago office. It meant packing up and moving overseas. For George, his time with IDEO was pivotal, both to his understanding of what design was, but also for what it felt like to work as part of a world-class team.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">During his time at IDEO, George was already noticing questions about the work, why we do it, and why certain projects — those with a clear social mission — engendered very different feelings in him than those without that mission. He wondered how he might focus this work on the social mission projects. Seven years on, he would leave IDEO to work at the Chicago Transit Authority, where he designed a bus and researched bus ridership.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When the political environment shifted and he was let go from the CTA, George started teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was here that his idea for a design studio focused solely on the social sector began to take shape.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Since co-founding Greater Good Studio, George has continued to ask the hard questions, and encourages his team and his students to do the same. George talks about why these questions are important, the dynamics of power and how it can offer insight into people’s motivations and behaviors, and how to incorporate these