Dear AIGA members,

We’re asking you to cast your vote below for the incoming AIGA Chicago board members. To better reflect our chapter’s commitment to Diversity & Inclusion, Design for Good and Education, we’ve created VP positions for each of these initiatives. These new roles also align with AIGA National’s mission to become more diverse, inclusive, and civically engaged. The term for these positions will commence in June, 2017. Please take a moment to cast your vote today. Voting ends June 1, 2017.

We also wish to extend sincere thanks to our outgoing board members Mig Reyes, President, Angela Vitzthum, Partnerships Chair, Elaine Lopez and LaShun Tines, Diversity Leads. Their service and dedication helped advance our mission, forge new partnerships and strengthen our community.

Final Slate
President – David Sieren
David solves design problems, makes pictures, keeps analog creative practices alive, and teaches students both young and old to care about all of the above.

He currently leads the design and strategy discipline at One Design Company, an independent Chicago studio focused on brand strategy and experience design. In 2007 he co-founded the Post Family, an independent Chicago-based collaborative focused on creating experiences that engage communities through art and design. An adjunct faculty member within DePaul University’s School of Design and a visiting instructor at Marwen, he considers engagement in the educational field to be an essential part of his practice. Believing in the power and potential of the Chicago design community, David has served on the AIGA Chicago Board of Directors since 2013, currently in the role of VP of Community Engagement. David holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

VP of Design for Good – Erin Huizenga
Erin Huizenga is Co-Founder and Principal at Borough + Block. She’s always thinking about how to design strategies that will lead to more equity, access, and dignity for all. She’s most recently been working as a Senior Design Strategy Consultant at Gensler, leading partnerships with Chicago Public Libraries and Housing Options by facilitating workshops and guiding project vision. She’s got entrepreneurship in her veins having successfully launched and grown both EPIC (iamepic.com) and Till School (tillschool.com). For Borough + Block, she guides research methods, creates partnerships, and provides creative direction. She’s worked with companies such as Motorola, Converse, Best Buy, SC Johnson, OfficeMax, and PNC Bank at firms gravitytank, VSA Partners, and IDEO and created the Innovation Narratives graduate course for Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design and designed curriculum she teaches for graduate-level design and social entrepreneurship courses at Northwestern University.


VP of Diversity & Inclusion – Antonio Garcia
Antonio is Portfolio Lead at Northern Lab, Northern Trust’s internal innovation accelerator focused on client and partner experience design. Before that he led gravitytank’s interaction design discipline and social innovation practice. Prior to working in innovation, Antonio was strategic director of Firebelly Design. He holds a BFA in Advertising Design from the Atlanta College of Art (now SCAD) and attended the Harvard Business School AIGA Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders Executive Education Program in 2007. Antonio teaches Visual Storytelling and Communication Design at Northwestern University’s Segal Design Institute and previously taught Customer Discovery as part of University of Chicago’s Polsky Center Entrepreneurship Essentials. A frequent contributor to community conversations on the topics of diversity, culture and creativity, Antonio believes design’s sole function is to create change.

Antonio’s side projects include DJing, illustration and an upcoming book on 8-bit and 16-bit video game iconography.

VP of Education – Amir Berbić
Amir Berbic is a designer and educator dedicated to projects with a social or cultural dimension. He has practiced design in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, working with community and arts publications, cultural institutions, and small businesses. Amir is on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Design and is an Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Architecture, Design and the Arts. His research interests are in place identity, dimensional typography, cross-disciplinary practices, and design pedagogy. Prior to joining UIC, he taught design at the American University of Sharjah, in the UAE, where he examined branding campaigns for Dubai’s architectural developments.

Amir’s design, writing, and teaching output have been featured in several academic and professional publications, conferences, and exhibitions including Print, Design Issues, ICOGRADA World Design Congress, AIGA Design Educators Conference, TypeCon, the Hyperlinks exhibition at the museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, Salone Internazionale del Mobile, in Milan, and many others. He holds a BFA in graphic design from UIC and an MFA in visual communication from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

We wish to thank the members of our nominating committee:

Vernon Lockhart, Art on the Loose
Rusty Cook, Sprout Social
Scott Theisen, VSA Partners
Dawn Hancock, Firebelly
Mig Reyes, AIGA Chicago President
Amy Guterman, AIGA Chicago Co-VP of Member Experience
Amy Schwartz, AIGA Chicago Co-VP of Member Experience