Commentary: TAGA … Four Words That Saved An Association

I take great pride that this year’s Technical Association of the Graphic Arts (TAGA) conference is named, TAGA NextGen Conference.

Most in our industry are unaware that this title designates the culmination of a 30-year transition recognizing that the growth of the graphic communication industry rests in students, the future innovators and leaders of our industry. This transition resulted from four words: Open membership to students.

Here is the story.

Seemingly appropriate, the year was 1984. I was on the Board of Directors of TAGA, and we met to discuss how to increase TAGA membership. Founded in 1949, TAGA reached its apex in the 1970s with about 2000 members. However, membership was decreasing rapidly, likely due to some industry compression and graphic arts research shifting from private independent research organizations to proprietary corporate research. The question we pondered was: How do we reverse decreasing TAGA membership? I offered the four words: Open membership to students. There was quiet around the table, and all of a sudden “the lights went on,” and the rest is history.

Related story: WhatTheyThink to Become Hosting Organization for TAGA

California Polytechnic State University students with The Helmut Kipphan Cup.

I was then asked to develop a formal proposal for the next year’s TAGA board meeting about how to formalize and broaden student memberships. It was unanimously approved. Prior to that, the only student involvement was by a very few graduate students, mostly international doctoral students, doing scientific dissertation research and presenting their work at the annual TAGA conferences. Undergraduate students were not at all involved.

Following the approval, I was appointed the first TAGA board member student chapter chair. At the time I was department head of Graphic Communication at Cal Poly where we formed the first TAGA student chapter. Professor Bob Chung of RIT, established the second TAGA student chapter at RIT, and succeeded me as the next TAGA board student chapter chair. Other schools quickly followed in forming chapters. The cornerstone of the chapters became the student journals, presented as part of a competition at the annual TAGA conferences. This demonstrated the students’ understanding of research and technology, and vision for the future. It established  schools as the source of our future industry leaders.

In a September 30, 2024 WhatTheyThink article titled, “WhatTheyThink to Become Hosting Organization for TAGA,” Adam Dewitz, WhatTheyThink’s Chief Technology Officer said:

We will be looking at opportunities to expand the reach and focus of the organization, especially as related to opportunities for students who are the future of our industry…a student-job fair is one of the additions to the conference that we will implement at the 2025 event, giving students the opportunity to interact with potential employers and to increase their interest in an industry career.

In the same article, Mark Bohan, TAGA Immediate Past President and Director of Color Solutions at Konica Minolta said, “ … we will be increasing our focus on the next generation of leaders coming into our industry…students are core to what we do.”

Students and industry members together are now the focus and core of the TAGA organization. This instills confidence that our industry’s future leadership is being well prepared via TAGA. I am gratified to having been part of the start of the TAGA student chapters program 30 years ago. I urge our industry’s present leadership to embrace and support TAGA and the TAGA NextGen Conference this year (March 25 – 27) and in the years to come, and be part of passing on their knowledge to future industry leaders who are sure to take it to the “next level.”

In conclusion, Thomas Kuhn, an American historian and philosopher of science, wrote in his acclaimed 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like.

According to Kuhn, this is a paradigm, a set of ideas, assumptions, and beliefs that shape how the scientific community, and the population at large, views the world. An anomaly, according to Kuhn, contradicts an accepted paradigm. Once universally accepted as truth, the anomaly becomes a new paradigm, and the cycle of anomalies becoming paradigms begins again in the search of truth.

And what of the future of our industry? What anomalies lie ahead? Don’t ask me. Ask the bright young minds who will be attending the 2025 TAGA NextGen Conference.