Rebecca Mushtare & Doug Bartow of AIGA Upstate New York: 45,000 Square Miles of Community

Written By Rachel Elnar

Nine. Simultaneous. Cocktail parties.

Not a flex. A geography problem with a creative solution. AIGA Upstate New York covers 45,000 square miles—Albany, Troy, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Ithaca, Binghamton—and at their peak, they had designers gathered in all of it at the same time, on a Tuesday night, checking in on their phones, under a program called CMYK: Come Meet Your Kind.

I told them that detail was blowing my mind in real time. It still is. We tried a hub system in LA. We couldn’t pull off concurrent. And we just have seven miles between us.

They Just Kept Showing Up

Neither Doug nor Rebecca set out to build something significant. Doug brought a portfolio review to the Albany area because the chapter wasn’t programming there. Seventeen years later, they’re still doing it. Rebecca started Friday lunch dialogues for design educators because people across campuses were isolated. Those relationships held the community together through COVID when everything else fell apart.

No grand strategy. Just showing up, consistently, until showing up becomes the thing people count on. I feel like I say this a lot on this podcast because I keep meeting people who prove it.

What Raleigh Actually Did

They went to the 2016 Leadership Retreat together—both of them, which was their full chapter allocation. Doug came back with one main takeaway: they weren’t behind. Finding Colorado (another sprawling geography chapter with the same exact problems) and realizing their struggles were identical gave him permission to stop apologizing for what Upstate couldn’t do and just do what it could.

Rebecca came back with an IBM design thinking framework she’s still using today. Not in design work. In university administration. Faculty meetings. Culture change. She called it “an ongoing gift.”

That’s the ROI nobody puts in the pitch deck for why leadership retreats matter.

Design Thinking Is a Life Skill (She Proved It)

Rebecca is Deputy Dean now. Zero visual design in the role. And she made the case—casually, almost as an aside—that she uses design skills every single day. Systems thinking. Framing problems. Bringing people along who don’t think that way. She’s often the only person at the table who approaches things like a designer.

Doug made the same point from a completely different angle: he’s red-green colorblind and uses AI to generate color palettes. Not a philosophical stance. Just a designer solving a real problem with a tool that works. While everyone else debates the existential implications of AI, Doug’s getting his hex codes.

I love him for this.

The Part That Survived

COVID ended their heyday. The nine-location cocktail parties, the full board, the cross-state programming—gone. What’s left is a Slack group, a portfolio review that never stopped, and two people who are still connected because, as Doug put it, you’d have to actively decide not to be. You’d have to actively ghost an entire community.

Rebecca said it differently: when COVID hit, those relationships were already there. Educators who might have been competitors became the people you called when everything shifted overnight.

I keep coming back to that. Not the heyday. The part that survived it.

The Glass Room

There’s a Facebook photo of approximately 30 people jammed into a glass room at the Raleigh retreat. Rebecca is in it, laughing. She had zero memory of it until Doug pulled it up mid-call. (You can see it on the YouTube episode.)

She’s an introvert. She would have preferred the corner. Doug said you’re coming with me and she said okay, and somewhere in there she stopped standing against walls entirely. She now runs accessibility conferences for entire university systems and doesn’t flinch.

Doug's take: “I don’t get enough credit. That’s the takeaway here.”

He’s not wrong.

More retreat stories, more pyramids, and forgotten programming:

Rachel Elnar
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Amy Gustincic & Jay Ganaden of AIGA San Francisco: Make Your Own Luck