George Aye
Is Designing a
Better Future

“More often than not the people we are doing interviews with hadn't realized they weren't being centered at all,” Aye said, referring to the process of clients coming into their sense of agency. “And in many cases, the workarounds they've already created, they never considered to be design work, which is something they hacked for themselves.” 

The flip side of this is designers not being cognizant of their responsibility, which Aye witnessed at a Palo Alto, California-based design and consulting firm he worked at for seven years prior to starting Greater Good. Raised in England, Aye went to school for engineering at Bournemouth University, graduated in 1998, and spent the next three years pivoting to design because it seemed like a better fit. He moved from London to work at the firm’s Chicago office in 2001.

“The nature of the questions are going to be different because we're trying to see how we can improve someone's life.”

“There was a bit of a disconnect, I thought, between the projects we promoted versus the projects we actually worked on,” Aye said. The rigor for expensive corporate clients was more acute compared with clients in the nonprofit sector, which were treated more like an afterthought because they weren’t as lucrative. Unless it came to things like for-profit healthcare companies. Then what’s “worthy” of attention gets complicated by applying the design strategies one would use for a corporate client to an institution that is not purely in the business of making money. “The nature of the questions are going to be different because we're trying to see how we can improve someone's life,” Aye said. 

This combination of clients led to ludicrous dichotomies. For Aye, the turning point was being tasked with designing insulin delivery devices on the one hand while designing products for Kool-Aid—essentially a vessel to help people consume enormous amounts of sugar—on the other. 

As a designer, situations like this made the necessity of self-reflection apparent.

“What exactly is the goal of this project?” Aye said. “And what is the risk that when we enter a complex social issue, typically with some community somewhere, is there any risk of making it worse? That's now become the next-gen level of questioning.”

This level of awareness manifests in all of Greater Good’s projects, including recent efforts to create more equitable access to Girl Scout troops in Chicago and Northwest Indiana and to expand health and wellness availability in urban, rural, and tribal communities.

The Girl Scouts project delivered a strategic roadmap with specific tactics to deepen the organization’s ties with the communities it serves and enrich their programming. And the community health project, which Greater Good did at the behest of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, held a series of nationwide public forums to field ideas from local residents, who applied for funding to make proposed changes in their respective communities. Greater Good compiled a report of the projects’ successes, but also included lessons learned in the hope that future community members could adopt or improve upon their models. Both examples show the lived experience of the people most impacted by social inequity being leveraged to form positive social change.

“Knowing a little more about how design intersects with all these other complex, mature disciplines that have been operating in social sector, is … what we're trying to work out for the next 10 years of our business,” Aye said. “I'd like to work out how to better understand and locate our discipline amongst all these other disciplines and learn how to work well together.” ■