In our latest episode, recorded at Seattle’s gorgeously fabulous Can Can (shoutout to our disco ball overlords), Gage walked us through his impossibly meandering journey from accidentally becoming AIGA Colorado’s student chapter president to somehow attending ten leadership retreats without breaking a sweat.

Picture this: college student Gage asks his sister’s designer friends for career advice. They tell him to “join AIGA.” He’s never heard of it. Does he Google it like a normal person? Nope. He immediately starts a student chapter and declares himself president. From there, it’s basically a Choose Your Own Adventure book where every choice leads to “Start Another Chapter.” Colorado to Charlotte to Wisconsin to Seattle—each move came with a new community organizing project.

Gage spilled the tea on leadership retreat culture, including the unofficial tradition where sleep-deprived design leaders would stay up all night just to say goodbye to the executive director at the airport. Because nothing says “professional development” like hobbling through your morning presentation on three hours of sleep and whatever caffeine you can legally consume.

The real meat of our conversation centered around Gage’s work evolving AIGA’s impact initiatives. He broke down the difference between “design for good” (using actual design thinking to solve problems) versus “designers doing good” (basically just being nice humans who happen to work in creative fields). His Seattle chapter’s Change Makers program matched creative teams with nonprofits for actual problem-solving, the kind of work people still spot “in the wild” years later.

And yes, we talked pyramids. Human pyramids. Apparently, there’s a whole underground culture of AIGA leaders building precarious human structures in hotel lobbies, elevators, and “anywhere you can squeeze in a pyramid.” Gage couldn’t give us an exact count but mentioned they once got kicked out of a ping pong bar for being “too dangerous.” Which honestly sounds about right for our community.

These days, Gage is channeling all that serial-chapter-starting energy into his sustainability-focused agency Modern Species and his mission to revive AIGA Seattle. Because apparently, one does not simply retire from community building.

Check out this week’s episode and listen wherever you get your podcasts, or just wait for Gage to show up in your city and start a listening party chapter.

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