Tiffany Meyers writes about advertising, design, business and culture. You can read her magazine features, many of them posted on this site, in publications like Communication Arts, Advertising Age, HOW, Entrepreneur, Metropolis, Hemispheres, The Chicago Tribune, Canada’s Globe & Mail and the business magazine PINK. Meyers also develops content for clients across industries, from fashion to technology. In addition to writing, the professional love of her life is EPIC, for which she serves as board president. A nonprofit, EPIC gives creative professionals the chance to use their talents to make social change happen.
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CONSIDER THE TARDIGRADE
Hemispheres Magazine
Consider the Tardigrade
By Tiffany Meyers, January 2011
The fast-growing field of biomimicry encourages innovators to look to nature-in all its wonder and weirdness-for solutions to our trickiest problems.
ONE AFTERNOON IN Grand Rapids, Michigan, Dayna Baumeister stands in a room full of Herman Miller employees, next to a trunk filled with seashells, feathers and other natural miscellany, and hands a sea cucumber to Carolyn Maalouf, a blindfolded R&D engineer. Don’t guess what the object is, Baumeister says. Guess what it does. Maalouf takes a shot. Well, it’s spiky, she says. Maybe it needs those spikes to ward off predators?
Another blindfolded colleague, meanwhile, is holding a swatch of sharkskin. With some guidance, he eventually deduces, correctly, from the smooth surface that his object is designed to move fast.
That they stumble through the exercise is pretty much the point. By eliminating sight—the sense that would instantly provide the “right” answer—the exercise succeeds in what Baumeister calls “quieting our cleverness.” This is crucial. Baumeister is the cofounder of The Biomimicry Guild, a group that promotes the increasingly popular notion that many of the best solutions to problems facing humanity can already be found in nature. “Biomimicry represents a paradigm shift away from the belief that we humans are the cleverest and most perfectly evolved,” says Baumeister. “When people believe that humans are the cleverest species, they might say, Why would I bother trying to learn from nature?”
IT’S A SWAMP THING
Metropolis Magazine
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 11:00 am
An IV drip of espresso would have stimulated the brain less than an afternoon at CUSP, the two-day innovation conference—created and hosted by design firm smbolic—that flipped Chicago’s lid last week.
Swampman kicked it off. Covered in head-to-foot, craft-store moss, former priest Mike Ivers took the stage, complaining of deadlines: “I’m swamped!” he shouted, shedding peat. Ivers, now President of Goodcity, a capacity-building organization for NPOs, proposed his perspective on swamps—or the social, economic and personal problems we’re trying to design ourselves out of. To find our way out of the bog, we have to get lost in it first. “Let us shift the paradigm of life’s swamps, and see them as adventures—frightening and scary, but always exhilarating!”
Halleluiah. Conferrers then dove into the “gumbo mud” and morass of Broken Systems like health care, food distribution, manufacturing and education.
WICKER PARK: WHERE HISTORY MEETS HAUTE
Globe and Mail
Wicker Park: Where history meets haute
By Tiffany Meyers | Tuesday, Jun. 15, 2010
Like so many of the best travel anecdotes, this one will start at The Crotch. At least that’s what some people are calling the six-corner intersection (Milwaukee, Damen and North Avenues) of the Chicago neighbourhood Wicker Park. On a typical day, a throng of people who care about progressive fashion, music, food and books, plus originality and Pabst Blue Ribbon, spill forth from that intersection, which, in all seriousness, you should really just call The Corners.
Along those three main drags, you’ll find a caffeinated, high- and low-end mash-up of DIY creativity, $200 skinny jeans, $2 tacos, new and used books and respectable people watching.
In 1870, Charles and Joel Wicker (a pair of brothers-cum-developers) appropriated 80 acres of land and called it, after themselves, Wicker Park. The devastation following the great Chicago fire, one year later, inspired a real-state boom in their domain, as German and Scandinavian brewery tycoons built their mansions along Hoyne and Pierce Streets, a.k.a. “Beer Baron Row.” (For more architectural eye candy, add Caton Street to your walking tour.)
