AIGA/NY Board Spotlight: Cliff Kuang

Cliff Kuang had never even visited New York before arriving at his dorm at Columbia. At school he studied philosophy and studio art, but never knew about the design profession until he worked as an editor at the late great I.D. Magazine. Today he’s the Head of Digital Product at Fast Company, having previously served as its Design Editor for many years. In that capacity, he was founding editor of its award-winning spin-off Co.Design, and wrote over 1,000 articles about interaction design, design thinking, and technology. It was that passionate belief in the design profession’s relevance in a changing world that brought Cliff to the AIGA/NY Board.

As part of AIGA/NY’s Communications committee, Cliff helps drive strategy for both content development and the communications. But as he points out, it’s the scrappy board-members and community that drive the organization and the design conversation in New York.Because design is always at the culture’s leading edge — looking to solve problems we live with everyday, and predicting problems we’ll live with tomorrow — Cliff believes that it’s the board’s duty to push the community’s aspirations higher.

Cliff argues that a recent upswing in mainstream design interest stems from an increasing awareness that design is ubiquitous and decisive in everyday life. We now expect everything to be as easy as hailing an Uber. However, to him, that very simplicity means that people notice more when things don’t meet our unspoken expectations. As he says “You can’t hide anymore, which means design is now a topic of everyday conversation because we encounter so much of it.”