AIGA Design Podcast

In this episode, hosts Lee-Sean Huang and Giulia Donatello welcome Martin LeBlanc, Chief Experience Officer at Magnific (the AI creative platform formerly known as Freepik). A designer and entrepreneur with 25 years of experience across computer science, business, and creativity, Martin founded Iconfinder—which grew into a global design asset marketplace before being acquired by Magnific. Together, they explore how generative AI is shifting creative execution, why large organizations struggle to adapt to systemic changes, and how designers can retain control of their creative authorship. Martin also provides a live walkthrough of Magnific's node-based canvas, illustrating how generative AI can be integrated into repeatable, professional design systems without training on user data.

In This Episode
Empowering vs. disrupting design. Reflecting on his 25 years in design, Martin acknowledges that AI disrupts old workflows while empowering creators to reinvent how they build. He stresses that designers historically adapt and win when they actively direct new technology.

The "Magic Wand" product philosophy. Magnific balances two priorities: keeping tools simple for beginners via auto-settings, while embedding granular, professional controls just beneath the surface for advanced directors.

Rewriting the rules of production. AI lowers financial and technical barriers for independent creators. Complex ad campaigns and visual effects that once required massive studios or green screens can now be produced by solo creators or small teams.

Designing repeatable systems. Demonstrating Magnific's node-based canvas ("Spaces"), Martin shows how prompts, manual edits, vector design, and automated translations combine to form shareable, repeatable production pipelines.

The "Tsunami" moment and pivot. Martin details how Freepik navigated its shift to an "AI-first" company and rebrand to Magnific. Seeing how AI would disrupt traditional stock assets, the company launched an internal "Labs" unit to develop future-facing tools.

The "No-Collar Economy" and taste. As AI lowers technical hurdles, a designer’s true value shifts to discernment, curation, and taste—knowing what to keep, what to scrap, and how to refine the final 20% of a piece.

IP, authorship, and data privacy. Magnific protects user rights with full commercial licenses, zero customer data training, and a downloadable "lineage" metadata trail to help designers prove human authorship.

Getting started through side projects. For designers overwhelmed by rapid AI updates, Martin advises focusing on hands-on side projects and workflow mechanics rather than chasing tool hype.

Resources

Magnific (30% AIGA Community Discount on Annual Premium Plans) – https://referral.magnific.com/aiga?mz
Martin's Podcast Demo Workflow (Magnific Space) – https://www.magnific.com/app/spaces/a243c19e-c681-4e82-ad7e-4b28a66f9599/invite?payload=eyJpdiI6Ikg1VWhOZzlla2RoTGNLQzB6QjlRRkE9PSIsInZhbHVlIjoidlRHMjNKR01kRVRPSS83MUtsZEt2bUFIWk1SYWRLcnF4NWNXRk1GdzBFdzlxMDQ2OTJnWnluaHcyMkJnWExOckFCN0JxME1UTUpUZEZOb0FrWXRaemd6cGw0Rkx3b1RENU1VRWFiYk5ncnJCNEdqYTRzZ1gxeWEyTUZaRUZXRDYiLCJtYWMiOiI3M2IwODYzYTY2MmY0YzkzZGYzNjJjNjRiZDg5MWZiOTM2ODJlM2Q3YWE3MjQyYzcwZTkyOTA3YjY0NzdlZTVlIiwidGFnIjoiIn0

The No-Collar Economy White Paper – https://www.reasonwhy.es/media/library/no-collar-white-paper.pdf

Magnific Academy Tutorials – https://www.magnific.com/academy
AIGA Design Podcast Feedback and Voicemails – podcast@aiga.org

In this episode, hosts Lee-Sean Huang and Giulia Donatello sit down with Jeff Leitner, the co-founder of UX for Good, architect of Norm Design, and a partner to organizations ranging from the US State Department and NASA to Harvard Medical School. Together, they unpack the core ideas behind his Summer 2026 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, "The Science of Norm Design," exploring why smart, well-funded initiatives fail roughly 70% of the time. 

Jeff shares his extensive experience studying the "invisible architecture" of social environments. He offers a critical challenge to the design industry, inviting practitioners to look past boilerplate briefs and standard user research to systematically uncover and design for the unwritten rules that dictate human behavior.

In This Episode
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The definition of norm design. Jeff defines norm design as an essential layer built on top of traditional research to uncover a group's informal, unwritten rules. Because every solution lands within a complex social ecosystem, these hidden dynamics ultimately dictate whether a design succeeds or fails.

The 70% organizational failure rate. Stagnant for decades, the standard failure rate for organizational change is famously high. The uncomfortable reality is that most interventions fail because they inadvertently obey the exact same unwritten rules as the problems they are trying to fix.

The New Orleans musicians' paradox. Partnering with UX for Good to help local musicians, who average $24,000 a year, the team found that standard financial literacy training routinely failed. A norm-based approach revealed that musicians viewed asking for tips as humiliating. By bypassing the ask and adding a tipping line directly to club receipts, they successfully transferred thousands of dollars to bands.

Unwritten rules vs. employee manuals. Social norms are rarely documented. To find a company's true constraints, Jeff suggests asking employees what they would tell a best friend over drinks about "how the place really works," rather than what's printed in the onboarding manual.

The structural empathy trap. While designers champion empathy, leaning too deeply into a user's perspective can cause researchers to absorb the same invisible constraints that the target group can't see, effectively blinding the designer to the overarching social norms.

Empathy vs. compassion in Rwanda. At the Kigali Genocide Memorial, the team challenged the default industry strategy of showing horror to inspire action. Brain research shows that witnessing suffering floods our pain circuits, causing distress, fatigue, and shutdown. By profiling ordinary heroes, they engaged the brain's compassion networks to cultivate the will to act.

How success derailed NASA. Jeff discovered that 100% of interviewed NASA staff anchored their operational norm to JFK's 1962 "Moonshot" speech. However, waiting for a singular political figure to rally the public blinded the agency to the modern reality of private spaceflight, turning a historic triumph into a systemic roadblock.

Resources
The Science of Norm Design by Jeff Leitner (Stanford Social Innovation Review) – https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the-science-of-norm-design
Leitner Studio Official Website – leitnerstudio.com 
UX for Good Nonprofit – uxforgood.org 
Cracking the Code of Change by Nitin Nohria and Michael Beer, the original source of the 70% failure rate of change initiatives (Harvard Business Review)  – https://hbr.org/2000/05/cracking-the-code-of-change

AIGA Design Podcast Feedback and Voicememos – podcast@aiga.org

In this episode, hosts Lee-Sean Huang and Giulia Donatello sit down with Ian Bogost, a writer, designer, media scholar, contributing writer at The Atlantic, and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Together, they explore the concept of "dematerialization" and the core ideas behind his latest book, This Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. Ian shares how his multifaceted career, navigating both software design and cultural criticism, functions as a dialectical machine for understanding how human meaning is constructed. He challenges contemporary design dogmas around "frictionlessness" and outcomes-based UX, offering a refreshing invitation for designers to embrace mundane constraints, celebrate accidental experience, and reconnect with the sensory enchantment of everyday life.

In This Episode
The designer-critic dialectic. Ian describes his career as a perpetual cycle between making and criticizing. For him, creating an object or game is a method of asking a question, while writing criticism is a vehicle for answering it—both serving the ultimate mystery of how humans derive meaning. 

Happiness vs. satisfaction vs. gratification. Ian breaks down three tiers of contentment. While happiness looks at long-term macro circumstances, satisfaction focuses on the pride of completing a project, and gratification is the fleeting, immediate sensory enchantment of the present moment—like ice clinking in a water bottle. 

The "wicked problem" of the modern door. Revisiting Don Norman's famous concept, Ian argues that modern doors don't fail due to bad design, but from an accumulation of competing successes. Fire codes, ADA compliance, and motorized automation layer, so many good intentions that the physical object ends up resisting us. 

The outcome trap of experience design. Ian observes that as design became heavily filtered through the computing sector, fields like interaction and UX design slowly stopped prioritizing actual experience. Instead, they focused intensely on business outcomes and optimized targets for organizations. 

Why "meaningful friction" is the wrong answer. Addressing the push to bring back "meaningful friction" to combat ultra-smooth glass screens, Ian calls the trend wrongheaded. Users don't want a task to be harder; they want a tactile loop of sensory connection to the machine, like a knob turning in defined physical increments. 

The vicarious gratification of ASMR. Reflecting on digital phenomena like ASMR and online "drain-clearing" videos, Ian views these creators as heroes. By treating ordinary objects with deep respect, they model a curiosity that can transform how viewers interact with their own everyday environments.  

Living life sideways through orthogonality. Ian advocates for "orthogonality"—diversifying one’s diet of sensory encounters by crossing boundaries into entirely different fields. True innovation arises from deeply exploring secondary constraints and productively marrying two completely unrelated domains. 

Resources
Ian Bogost's Official Website – https://bogost.com/

This Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost – https://amzn.to/4ypiHBR

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman – https://amzn.to/4gWhSd8 
Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames by Ian Bogost – https://amzn.to/4p5IQBf 
Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games by Ian Bogost – https://amzn.to/4eZwgyD 
Julian Bleecker – https://julianbleecker.com/ 
Bruce Sterling – https://bruces.medium.com/ 
Listener feedback and voicemails – podcast@aiga.org

In this episode, hosts Lee-Sean Huang and Giulia Donatello welcome back Rinat Sherzer—a biotech engineer, transdisciplinary designer, artist, and adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design whose work sits at the intersection of science, technology, and social justice. Together, they discuss the deep human construct of hope, unpacking how it differs from mere wishful thinking and exploring how designers can act as vital conduits for it. Rinat shares her journey from scientific training to social innovation, the unpredictable ripple effects of her global projects, and how she balances multi-sensory design, teaching, and motherhood through an intentional quarterly focus.
In This Episode
The logic of the backward glance. Rinat shares her journey from biotechnology engineering into tech and ultimately to design for social innovation. Mirroring Steve Jobs' famous sentiment, she notes that the dots of a multidisciplinary career can often only be connected in hindsight.

The history and bad rep of hope. When researching the framework of hope for her PhD, Rinat was struck by its historical negativity. From Plato viewing it as an unreliable guide to Nietzsche labeling it the worst of all evils, it wasn't until Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in 1946 that hope was structurally recognized as a vital resource for human survival.

The three dimensions of hope framework. Moving beyond Richard Snyder's purely cognitive, goal-oriented approach, Rinat's framework treats hope as an embodied, immersive experience. It breaks down into three dimensions: the extreme moment (crisis or joy) where hope is born, the greater social good if that hope comes to fruition, and the concrete, physical action an individual can take.

Breaking bread and multi-sensory co-design. Rinat breaks down her immersive project, The Rebirth of Hope, which utilizes sound and taste to tap into primal, nonverbal memories. By choosing raw ingredients that resonate with their personal dimensions of hope, participants create a literal "bite of hope" to consume collectively, bridging the deeply personal with the universal synergy of a group.

Translating data into human music. The Rebirth of Hope project actively translated participant choices into real-time visual musical scores. By mapping hope attributes to chords, rhythm, and melody, a live band performed the collective, experimental music of the exhibition's audience.

The accountability gap in design education. As a faculty member at Parsons, Rinat addresses the split between the theory of "design for good" and the messy reality of execution. She argues that standard academic design thinking often leaves prototyping and testing to the very end, missing the vital skills of real-world implementation, business case development, and multi-team collaboration.

The organizing cadence of a year. To juggle a global teaching schedule, running her studio (The Creative Lab), artistic output, and raising her son Luca, Rinat rejects daily micromanagement. Instead, she structures her life by dividing the year into quarters, allowing herself to intensely focus on one major priority at a time while setting strict, non-negotiable boundaries for family.

Resources
Rinat Sherzer's Official Website – renatsherzer.com

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl – https://amzn.to/4geMQgv

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin– https://amzn.to/4aukCdW

The Bloody Taboo with Power to Change the World (Rinat's TEDx Talk) – https://www.ted.com/talks/rinat_sherzer_the_bloody_taboo_with_the_power_to_change_the_world

AIGA Design Podcast Feedback and Voicemails – podcast@aiga.org

What does it actually take for design to matter inside a massive organization? In this episode, hosts Giulia Donatello and Lee-Sean Huang sit down with Seth Johnson to talk about design at enterprise scale, and what designers get wrong about building influence.

Seth Johnson is Design Director at IBM's Chief Data Office, where he leads a team driving AI-first enterprise data transformation. Over a 12-year tenure at IBM, his work has evolved from designing artifacts and experiences toward designing the conditions under which good design can happen at scale. Before IBM, he founded a Minneapolis-based design practice. He has served as president of AIGA Minnesota and as an adjunct faculty member at Parsons School of Design.

In This Episode
From a used bookshop to IBM. Seth's path to design started at age 12, flipping through Dorfsman & CBS in a used bookshop, and seeing for the first time what design could look like as a system at scale. That same impulse, he says, is what he's still chasing at IBM, just at a different altitude.

Design as infrastructure. At IBM's Chief Data Office, Seth's team exists to provide the company with a single, trusted view of how the business is performing. Design's role there is turning data from something people dread into something they rely on every day.

The business doesn't care about design. And it shouldn't. Seth's most provocative argument: design only earns influence when it connects itself to outcomes leadership actually cares about: revenue, risk, speed, and fewer defects. Designers are always outnumbered. That means assimilating into the organization's dominant rhythms before earning the right to ask anyone else to change.

Treat your team like volunteers. Seth's core leadership philosophy, drawn from years of running AIGA Minnesota: talented people decide every day how much energy and creativity they're willing to invest. You might get the work, but you won't get the commitment. And you definitely can't fake caring at scale.

The era of the lone genius is over. On design education: Seth argues that schools still do a reasonable job of preparing designers to work independently, but fall short in preparing them to lead within teams. Design is a team sport, and design students should be partnering across disciplines—biology, nursing, public policy—before they ever step into practice.

Resources Mentioned
Dorfsman & CBS by Dick Hess and Marion Muller - ⁠https://amzn.to/4unbsHT⁠ (out of print; available secondhand)
Humanizing Data Through Design with Giorgia Lupi (AIGA Design Podcast on YouTube) - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZZIR8W9AlY⁠
Giorgia Lupi on the AIGA Design Podcast (Other Platforms) - ⁠https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/aigadesign/episodes/Humanizing-Data-Through-Design-with-Giorgia-Lupi-e3fi3h1/a-acg9jrh⁠
Seth Johnson & Jenny Price: How AIGA Leadership Changed Everything - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12f7g-YG8cY⁠  
Designing Change in Bureaucracy with Ivan Boscariol (YouTube) - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f5zESGtKb8⁠
Designing Change in Bureaucracy with Ivan Boscariol (Other Platforms) - ⁠https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/aigadesign/episodes/Designing-Change-in-Bureaucracy-with-Ivan-Boscariol-e32eemt⁠
Corita Kent, 2016 AIGA Medalist Video - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tivdlh2mhIU⁠ 
IBM Design - ⁠https://www.ibm.com/design ⁠

Subscribe to the AIGA Design Podcast on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts: ⁠https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/aigadesign ⁠

Send us your questions, comments, and voicemails at ⁠podcast@aiga.org⁠.