AIGA Events app: designers designing for designers

February 25th, 2014 by Deloitte Digital | Design and UX, DD news

Non-profit AIGA, a professional association for designers, wanted to create a mobile app that would combine event calendars of local chapters into a filter-able, nationwide listing. Aaron Shurts, Deloitte Digital Associate Creative Director and AIGA Seattle Chapter President, put a team together to make it happen.

At the end of February, the brand new AIGA Events app was launched in the App Storeand Google Play. That means, members across the country can now find events by city or date, get detailed event information, add it to their personal calendars, and – in some cases – get directions based on their location. It was built to pull content from the event planning tools that local chapters already use, so that, voila! The app updates auto-magically with minimal changes to each chapter’s workflow.

This project came out of the Seattle studio’s Innovation Lab, D3. Aaron Shurts, Deloitte Digital Associate Creative Director and AIGA Seattle Chapter President, brought this opportunity to the group to see if our teams could make it happen.

Not only was this an opportunity to support professional designers, but we saw that an app done right could also play a strong role in helping AIGA in their membership goals. They’re trying to double their membership by 2015, and increased brand consistency and visibility between local chapters is key to reaching that goal. Because the app is free for anyone, AIGA member or not, they’re also hoping to heighten awareness of design capabilities both in the design world, as well as in the broader business community.

“Deloitte Digital from its inception has always been a great collaborator for our local chapter here in Seattle, and I am happy that I was able to use a bit of my pull to engage colleagues in the studio to be a part of this bigger community,” says Shurts. “As a chapter, we wanted to put Seattle design on the map. We hope that by creating an app that leverages all of the chapters nationwide we can accomplish that mission."

For AIGA’s first nationwide app, it was important that we get it right, and we’re pretty pleased with how it turned out. We’re also glad we had the opportunity to work with a non-profit organization with such a close connection to what we do every day.