Walking down the street a few months ago, Ji Lee, a creative director at Google Labs, noticed a funny thing. Many New York businesses still had logos with the silhouette of the World Trade Center in them. It was, he thought, both a wonderful, joyful--and sad--moment. So he took a picture. Of the New York magazine logo. Of the CitiStorage logo. Of the Burritoville logo. Of butcher shops and shoe repair places, all of which had those two iconic towers--ghostly silhouettes of a pre-9/11 world--still hovering in their identity.
The idea to preserve them took fire in his brain. "It was like an Easter egg hunt, or a scavenger hunt," he said.
Two weeks ago, instead of keeping the idea to himself, he uploaded all the images to a Flickr site called "WTC Logo Preservation Project," where he invited folks to upload their own images and to comment. Recently he merged with a similar site called "WTC iconography."
The two sites now have hundreds of images, which is cool in itself. But along the way, this little personal project, and a few others that have earned Ji Lee some notoriety (namely, the Bubble Project, in which he attached empty thought bubbles to wall advertisements implicitly inviting folks to fill in the blanks), have taught Lee a few things about himself.
His wisdom to the Behance crowd:
Personal and professional projects complement each other.
Creating platforms is powerful. "You instantly gain a sense of scale and reach. And you get to meet cool people."
Time is a concept that can be stretched. "Time is just an idea," he said. "It's amazing what you can do in an hour."
Sharing is rewarding. "Teachers taught me that when have a great idea, you must protect it," he said. "That creative philosophy has changed. People are creating projects for free, just for the joy of sharing. And something always comes back in bigger scale."
Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green, a social entrepreneurship funder which has dispensed over $27M to projects such as City Year and Teach for America, says the people who make things happen share certain common traits.
Each year Echoing Green vets about 1000 ideas to come up with 15 projects they want to fund. The trick, Dorsey says, is ferreting out which of those submissions is not just a scalable idea, but has a person behind it with the right stuff to make it happen.
"There's truly magic to doing this work," she said. "You've got to find the right person, with the right idea, who can execute, and who's at the right moment in time for idea to take flight."
To separate the worthy from the wannabes, Echoing Green canvassed the characteristics of more than 500 Echoing Green fellows. They distilled them and put them together into something they call the social entrepreneurship intelligence--with a nod to Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (EQ).
Running out of time, Dorsey listed six:
Core identity formation and alignment. "These folks," she said, "have reached a level of authenticity in life. They have found purpose and passion. They know what they're on earth to do. They're in the Social Change 'zone.' They have head/heart alignment."
Focused and ability to execute with alacrity. "It's not enough to have an idea. You must be able to prove your model is having an impact and build on it."
Solutions oriented.
Asset based thinking. "Most of us deficit based thinkers," Dorsey said. "But instead of seeing the world as filled with problems, they see opportunities. They see the glass as half full, and execute against all odds."
Resource magnet. They're able to draw money, garner human capital, and attract media attention.
The Behance conference, which calls itself the 99% Conference is about--well, how to say this nicely--well, sweat. As in Edison's quote, "Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration."
Enough with the ideas, already! The point, says Behance host Scott Belsky, who took the stage this morning at the posh Times Center in New York, is execution. How do serial entrepreneurs or other remarkably productive folks, actually make things happen in their lives?
It's a question with particular relevance to these times. When has the world needed more of both ideas and execution? When have so many people had so much time on their hands to do just that--those of us, that is, who aren't already working three people's jobs as the privilege of staying employed?
"Most ideas never happen," says Belsky. "It's an uphill battle against the status quo and our own tendencies."
Think, he said, of the half written novels, the unrealized cures for diseases, the fabulous social entrepreneurship projects that could happen if people just knew better how to go from the idea stage to the point where the rubber really hits the road.
Are there teachable principles here? We'll let you know what we find out as the day, and a pretty remarkable line-up of doers, take the stage.
"Your movie made me physically sick," one audience member told Gary Hustwit (left), the director of Objectified, the eagerly anticipated film about industrial design, last night at a screening in New York.
Far from being miffed, Hustwit grinned. "Maybe that's what we were trying to do," he said slyly.
The film, which chronicles the back story of the people and processes that create the vast array of designed objects that surround us every day, was screened before an audience largely made up of the very folks who toil in front of CAD programs and rapid prototyping machines to churn out those products.
But there's an essential tension at the heart of this story. On the one hand, Hustwit, who created the hugely popular film, Helvetica, celebrates the masters who have created some of the most successful products of our time--Jonathan Ive of Apple; Bill Moggridge, the "father of interactive design;" David Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO; Karim Rashid of Dirt Devil fame; and Dieter Rams of Braun.
On the other hand, he shows us the legacy of our consumption-driven culture: stacks of dissembled computers on their way to the smelter. TVs, furniture, all manner of goods, abandoned on the curb for trash day. Then frenzied shoppers, filling up their carts with new cheap goods at IKEA.
When a freshly-designed toothbrush washes up on the shore of some remote idyllic beach--and the boss sends a picture of the barnacle-encrusted artifact back to the office--the folks at IDEO are forced to confront the dissonance behind what they do. We watch them struggle to resolve the dilemma: we need to keep our teeth clean; the objects we use to do that pollute the planet. What to do?
This is an issue with acute resonance for all of us right now. We got ourselves into this economic meltdown at least partly because we've been on a buying binge for more than a decade, often using the equity in our houses and the generous limits on our credit cards to fill our homes and closets with stuff. The hangover has nearly killed us.
But the unintended consequence of our new frugality is a global recession. Retail sales reported yesterday are still dismal. Detroit is on the ropes. Circuit City is bankrupt. Linens 'n Things is gone with the wind. Unemployment is rising, China is a basket case. To get us out of this global slough of despond, we need to start buying again. Cars, houses, carpeting, electronics, dresses.
But if we succumb to the impulse to buy, we contribute to the further trashing of the ecosystem--not to mention our credit status. It is, as John Maynard Keynes wrote, the "paradox of thrift."
After celebrating the genius of industrial design in its first half, Objectified ends by showing designers grappling with the problem. "Most of what we design ends up in the landfill," says IDEO's Tim Brown ruefully. "We have to take that into account."
Karim Rashid suggests that anything that has a shelf life of 11 months or less--electronics, etc--should be made of cardboard, for maximum disposability. The New York Times columnist Rob Walker suggests shopping in your own closet, for stuff you bought and rarely used.
What's unspoken in this film is the role that marketing plays in the endless round of product introductions--the need to goose the bottom line with a new gizmo with a new, marginally better (or not) feature--to satisfy earnings expectations on Wall Street.
The role of design in all this? To create the products compelling enough to seduce us to buy. And then to relegate our old stuff to the landfill. And the beat goes on.
Thanks, Gary. I'm now feeling a little queasy myself, caught between my enduring affection for the Tahari sample sale, and the censorious example of my own bulging closet.
Objectified will have a series of screenings across the country over the next month, many followed by Q&As with Hustwit. Maybe somebody will come up with a solution to the film's central conundrum.
Last October, shortly after our annual Masters of Design issue hit the streets, I got an email from Gadi Amit, president of the San Francisco strategic design firm, NewDealDesign LLC. NewDealDesign was one of the "design factories" profiled in that issue, and Gadi, a leading design thinker himself, had been at a party to celebrate our Masters in New York.
In the nicest possible terms, Amit gently took Fast Company to task for devoting so much space in that issue to the industry's design super stars, and not enough to design for the "real world."
"As humanity is close to realizing the limits of 'progress' in resources and environmental impact, and as the political scene is revolting in demand for better attention to main-street needs, I find it odd that the design leadership is still holding to a 'trickle down' design philosophy," he wrote. "The notion is that mass-production design is second and inferior to that of the few design stars. Presumably they are serving humanity through their 'fabulosity', as they pave the path to other designers with innovative designs. In reality, these selected few are catering to a small and pampered crowd of the rich and famous, creating wasteful and undemocratic design that is seldom relevant or inspiring to the creation of real-world products. In reference to the point made by John Maeda in your panel discussion, one may think that if design has a valid, economically proven and effective methodology, it is surely to demonstrate it in mass-production, true industrial design, rather than a luxury condo project or the academic ivory tower. Designers have a role to play in dynamic and positive social growth. Designers should develop great and tangible tools to live, work and play."
While Fast Company has always tried to strike a balance between the cutting edge and trend-setting and the more functional and mass-market, I had to agree that Gadi had a point--never more so than in October 2008, as we all watched in horror as the financial markets melted down. By Christmas, luxury goods had come to be seen as symbols of a wasteful and indulgent age that nearly brought us to the brink of economic ruin. The more I thought about his note, the more his words rang true.
So, after meeting Gadi for lunch in New York a few weeks ago, we decided to ask him to join us on the site to discuss what was roiling his cranium these days. This week, Amit will be the first of a series of guest bloggers whose ideas we will showcase on Fastcompany.com.
We gave Gadi one assignment: tell us what aggravates, inspires, or excites you. No holds barred. We hope you'll enjoy reading his thoughts this week--and will chime in to agree, disagree, or simply add to the conversation.
Here are three great new projects from NewDealDesign, to give you a concrete idea of the design work Gadi's firm does. First is the charging station for A Better Place; second, the FitBit gadget, a calorie-counter for physical activity, which I lust after; and third, the Dell hybrid, the computer company's eco-remodeling of a standard PC tower.
Tallies are in for last weekend’s Armory Show, the big international art fair in New York, and not surpringly, Gallerist David Zwirner had to pack up his big Bernie Madoff painting and haul it back home.
The sepia-toned watercolor, by Yan Pei-Ming, was a big--if creepy--attraction. But for $100,000, nobody wanted it over the fireplace.
The Madoff Masterpiece wasn't the only art channeling the zeitgeist at the show. Indeed, you only had to look at the art on the walls to get a sense of what the cash in the till would be at the end of the day.
A marble plaque, with a chewed-off corner, hanging at a gallery near the entrance said it all:
While everyone’s been trying to put a brave face on the event ("We have been meeting a lot of new people!” said Valerie Carberry of Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago), sales were decidedly punier than during the Reign of the Hedge Fund Moguls. New York’s City File reports that most transactions were of the five-figure variety--a dramatic decrease from recent years when frantic collectors would race to the booths as soon as doors opened, and bid prices into the stratosphere.
As history has shown, artists are among the first to reflect the spirit of the times in their work, and the Recession of ’09 is no exception. Throughout the hall were paintings and works on paper that gave the sense of being ripped from the headlines.
Here are a few of our favorites:
Gordon Cheung showed a large painting made of acrylics, gel, spray--and stock tables--at the Jack Shainman Gallery. It’s title: "Living Machine, 2009”
One of the most poignant pieces by Beth Campbell, at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, was called, "My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances." It was a large sheet of paper, covered like a mind map, with penciled comments on the artist’s vision of her futile search for gainful employment. "I can’t even get a job > I settle for a low end job > I become a cocktail waitress in Atlantic City >I sweep the city sidewalks."
Which reminds us of Stella Adler's quote on life and art: "Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one."
Teaching a child with autism can be an exercise in frustration--for both teacher and child. But designers at the Boston office of the design firm Continuum have developed a teaching aid--still in the concept stage--that could go a long way toward solving some of the problems that currently plague the process.
Continuum is the design firm initially hired by Nicholas Negroponte to tackle the design for the One Laptop Per Child computer. While the final model was designed by San Francisco-based fuseproject, Continuum gained valuable expertise in learning tools during the project's development. Those skills proved useful in the design of Puzzle Piece, their Interactive Austistic Teaching Aid (shown here).
Autistic children have varying degrees of difficulty with social interaction and communication. Many are easily distracted from tasks.
Educators have found the best way to engage early learners is through a reward and consequence process called Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA). It goes something like this: the teacher asks the child a question. If he answers correctly, he earns a smiley face card. The teacher records the data, right or wrong. After five correct answers, the child gets a treat.
To be effective, this process has to be repeated for 20 to 40 hours a week. It's a daunting process, and one that hasn't really changed in years. Recognizing that health issues were increasingly amenable to design solutions, and that autism now affects 1 in 150 children, a team at Continuum set out to investigate what they could do to improve the process.
They began by observing teaching sessions with autistic youngsters at a suburban Boston school. "The teachers had to adapt what they were doing to a child's environment," says Delroy Dennisur, the lead designer on the team. "There were grown adults, sitting at children's tables, trying to record data in big binders."
Every time the teacher would turn away, and jot a response, she risked losing the child's attention. And juggling the unwieldy binders on a tiny desk, while keeping track of cue cards, and Goldfish snacks, was an impossible task. Additionally, although this process works best when it's augmented by parents, it was hard to keep them in the loop, regarding their child's day-to-day progress.
With Continuum's Puzzle Piece, a child is shown a picture card identified with a bar code. If he identifies it correctly, the teacher hits the "check" button to record that answer on the device, and a smiley face appears on the child's side. If it's incorrect, she hits the "X," which records the data. No smiley face appears.
When the session is complete, a USB dongle, with the child's results, is attached to his belt loop or backpack, assuring that the information gets home to his parents.
While the device does not yet exist, teachers at the test school were enthusiastic about its potential. "The next step is to try this with kids, and see how it works,: says Dennisur. "It's time to shine a light on this issue."
For 50 years, a certain American blonde with the figure of a Playboy bunny, the hair-do of a USC cheerleader, and the arches of a Conde Nast editor has been channeling the zeitgeist and fashioning her wardrobe accordingly.
She wore a pillbox when Jackie Kennedy was in the White House, and a mini dress when Twiggy was rocking Cool Britannia. Bob Mackie, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein all lobbied to dress her.
But the girl wasn’t just a bubble-headed fashionista. She had ambition, growing from gigs as a Candy Striper and flight attendant, into serious roles as an astronaut, NBA star, and Presidential candidate.
And she was as peripatetic as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times in her pursuit of seminal news events, suiting up for a European Summit meeting, donning togs for celebrating glasnost, and rifling through her wardrobe for just the right look for the fall of the Berlin Wall.
She is, of course, that princess of plastic, Barbie. The iconic doll, both revered and reviled since her introduction in 1959 (wearing a black and white striped bathing suit), is celebrating her 50th birthday today. Can a Cougar Barbie be far behind?
The doll, based on a German sex toy called Bild Lilli, which itself was based on a foul-mouthed promiscuous newspaper cartoon character, was originally created by Ruth Handler, a co-founder of Mattel, and nicknamed after her daughter.
The little vixen with the almond-shaped blue eyes and the Dynel hair, originally sold for $3. One of the originals, in mint condition, fetched $27,450 at auction in 2006.
Mattel estimates that it has produced a billion fashions for Barbie and friends since 1959, using 105 million yards of fabric – making it one of the world’s largest apparel manufacturers.
In honor of her birthday, today, Mattel is releasing the new Bathing Suit Barbie® doll, a modernized version of
the original 1959 doll that pays homage to Barbie’s original 1959
price by offering the new doll for $3 during the doll’s birthday
week (March 9-14 at participating retailers).
The doll features a new face with a more natural look, including a thinner jaw line, more almond-shaped eyes, fuller lips and a softer makeup palette, with shimmery pink lip shades and neutral eye colors. The new doll sports a two-piece black-and-white bikini trimmed with Barbie’s signature color pink (PMS 219), pink hoop earrings, a ponytail and, given how trendy she always is, a cell phone.
For all her popularity, Barbie has always been something of a celebrity hound, over the years channeling the likes of Lucille Ball, Priscilla Presley, and Cher, even in her most embarrassing exhibitionistic years.
And while she’s a worldwide sensation, with outfits ranging from geisha girl kimonos to Kenyan kente cloth, she’s been embraced about as lovingly as Dick Cheney in the Middle East. In 2003, the Saudis outlawed sales of Barbie, saying she was in conflict with the ideals of Islam. The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice stated "Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West.” The idea that Barbie is Jewish would probably come as a surprise to most people, who probably think she was modeled on a homecoming queen from SMU.
Still, as a cultural icon, Barbie has done better than many other American diplomatic initiatives. Some 18 million global users are registered on BarbieGirls.com, and there are 1,000 YouTube channels devoted to the ubiquitous doll, which is the #1 worldwide property in the traditional toy industry.
So, happy birthday, Barbie. We can’t wait to see your next incarnation (FDIC Barbie?) For 50 years old, you’re still one foxy dame.
It's pricey--$20 a ticket for adults. Often crowded. And two hours of parking in the 'hood will set you back $18. But for art lovers, a visit to New York's Museum of Modern Art is a jaw-dropping experience--like walking into the highlights reel of the best art history course you've ever taken.
But, if you can't get to Manhattan or are feeling the recession's pinch in your art-appreciation budget, check out the new MOMA website, that launches today, for a pretty impressive virtual tour. It's not really a match for being 18 inches from a Rothko (the artist's recommended distance), but it has all kinds of bells and whistles that make playing around with art and design an easy way to fritter away an hour.
The site makes use of all kinds of social media tools--from MOMA communities on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, iTunes U, and Flickr--to let users share the experience, or a favorite work of art, with others. There's also a multimedia section that shows off the museum's extensive collection of audio commentaries and videos. And, in a delightful display of democracy in action, MOMA is inviting citizen photographers to upload photos they've taken to the photo portfolio on MOMA's Flickr group. The best will be featured on the MOMA.org site, complete with photo credit (allowing you to brag to friends that you've "shown" your work at MOMA.)
For the launch, a section called "MOMA Voices" will open with a series of 30-second video portraits of MOMA members and staff by the Swiss artist Thilo Hoffmann. They range from a member talking about favorite secret rainy day spaces in the museum, to a whimsical tour of the place through the eyes of a child, to a staffer turning cartwheels in an empty gallery.
Much like the recommendation engine and wish lists that power Amazon, the new site will allow visitors to set up an online account and save or share favorite works--from paintings to films and exhibitions. It will also make suggestions for other things the user may have missed based on those preferences. Love that Picasso? Be sure to check out Rauschenberg!
If you're lucky enough to get to the museum itself, there are tools for planning beforehand--a useful feature, as anyone who has pooped out long before getting to "Starry Night" will appreciate.
What's an iced tea got to do to get respect these days? That's the question that tormented Snapple executives as they saw their product get squeezed in the bodega and pizza shop refrigerator cases by an assortment of enhanced waters, juices, and fancier teas (President Obama, for example, is a fan of barely-sweetened Whole Foods-hatched Honest Tea; the White House fridge is stocked with Green Dragon and Black Forest Berry.)
Now, for the first time in its 37 year history, the brand will roll out a new look, and new formula which, Snapple execs promise, has been thoroughly tested with the average Joes who form its target market. "We talked to Lennie in Manhattan, Hymie in Brooklyn, and Arnie in the Bronx," says Snapple Marketing VP Bryan Mazur. (Childhood friends Leonard Marsh, Hyman Golden and Arnold Greenburg started the company in Greenwich Village in 1972.)
While it's distributed nationally, 40% of the brand's sales are in New York.
The new formula will dispense with high fructose corn syrup -- the sweetening agent that has health-conscious moms all in a tizzy -- and will replace it with real sugar. Nutritionally, the two are identical, but HFCS has gotten a bad rap from health food fanatics. Snapple's new formula, however, will deliver 40 fewer calories per bottle, simply because the flavor's been punched up, Mazur says.
And, in an effort to capitalize on the current mania for green tea, the brand's new label with be adorned with a pair of tea leaves, and the message will be called out in a big box: "Made from Green & Black Tea Leaves." It's a mantra that the Snapple folks are hitting hard as they hit the streets: "Healthy green and tasty black!" Mazur told me, at least five times.
The new bottle will also be slimmer -- sized to fit cup holders, which weren't an issue back in 1972 -- and the label will be a little less hokey. Gone is the drawing of the sun and the curvy typeface, replaced by a slimmer san serif font, with quirky little drawings of bumblebees and trees.
To see how the new compared to the old we conducted a side-by-side taste test with parched Fast Company staffers, some of whom already had a hard core two-bottles-a-day Snapple habit. The results:
Old Snapple:
"It's fruiter," said one staffer, after an initial slug.
Others thought sweetness was the overwhelming take-away: "There's not as much flavor, but sweetness," said one.
"It's like Nestea," chimed in another.
Some liked the balance between tea and lemon. "It's more lemony, more natural." Like with a vintage wine, one non-tea drinker, noted the brew's mouth-feel: "It has a tongue-tingle thing going on."
New Snapple:
"This one is more fragrant," said our resident addict, sniffing the bouquet from a tiny paper cup. "Definitely the high fructose corn syrup one," another said with confidence -- despite being totally wrong.
But tasters weren't impressed with the lemon after-taste. "This one tastes like it has lemon out of a bottle….kind of a chemical taste." Another called the flavor "lemonesque."
"One's not a vast improvement over the other," most concluded. Maybe if you're making "the best stuff on earth," there's not upside potential.
Responses to the new label, however, were much less ambiguous:
"Those little graphics look like henna ttatoos," our Web editor said approvingly, a curious association until we remembered he lives in the East Village. "More Putumayo." "Very earthy."
"More high end," most agreed. "More like farm country." "It says 'all natural,'" several noted. "The 'S' (which is stamped into the bottle itself) is a big improvement."
The old label, said one long-time New Yorker, is more like old-fashioned New York, a comment which prompted a swing down memory lane of Snapple advertising on the Howard Stern show.
To be fair, I may have inadvertently biased the results, putting a star on one set of cups -- the old Snapple ones -- a faux pas which would have instantly gotten me drummed out of the Marketing Research Association.
Overall, taste testers agreed there wasn't a significant difference in the two teas. But all were cheered by the fewer calories, and most responded happily to the idea of eliminating HFCS.
Snapple will roll out its biggest ad campaign ever, tagged at somewhere in the eight figure range, (Ad Age reported the Snapple account, won by Deutsch, was worth $25M), beginning on May 4 and running through the summer. And Snapple facts freaks needn't worry. The brand's weird little factoids, like: "Long Island is the largest island in the continental U.S." and "The average woman consumes 6 pounds of lipstick in her lifetime," will remain.
The idea to preserve them took fire in his brain. "It was like an Easter egg hunt, or a scavenger hunt," he said. 
Each year Echoing Green vets about 1000 ideas to come up with 15 projects they want to fund. The trick, Dorsey says, is ferreting out which of those submissions is not just a scalable idea, but has a person behind it with the right stuff to make it happen. 
Enough with the ideas, already! The point, says Behance host Scott Belsky, who took the stage this morning at the posh Times Center in New York, is execution. How do serial entrepreneurs or other remarkably productive folks, actually make things happen in their lives? 
"Your movie made me physically sick," one audience member told Gary Hustwit (left), the director of 
When a freshly-designed toothbrush washes up on the shore of some remote idyllic beach--and the boss sends a picture of the barnacle-encrusted artifact back to the office--the folks at IDEO are forced to confront the dissonance behind what they do. We watch them struggle to resolve the dilemma: we need to keep our teeth clean; the objects we use to do that pollute the planet. What to do?
After celebrating the genius of industrial design in its first half, Objectified ends by showing designers grappling with the problem. "Most of what we design ends up in the landfill," says IDEO's Tim Brown ruefully. "We have to take that into account."
Now, for the first time in its 37 year history, the brand will roll out a new look, and new formula which, Snapple execs promise, has been thoroughly tested with the average Joes who form its target market. "We talked to Lennie in Manhattan, Hymie in Brooklyn, and Arnie in the Bronx," says Snapple Marketing VP Bryan Mazur. (Childhood friends Leonard Marsh, Hyman Golden and Arnold Greenburg started the company in Greenwich Village in 1972.)
Old Snapple:
