And he’s wearing a blindfold. Ivers, a former priest who knows how to raise a roof, shares the stage with a group of young people. Representing his fears, they lead him around, as fears are wont to do, and spin him in discombobulating circles. “Get dizzy at CUSP!” he hollers. His point? Fear is a constant. Learn to use it.

Attendees do have things to fear today. There are the forthcoming breaks, for instance, during which they’ll have to mingle. There’s failure. And success. And then there’s this: In any gathering about social innovation, there’s a chance that all the enthusiasm could snowball into that brand of unchallenged, “designers talking to designers” groupthink about The Power of Design.

But that doesn’t happen. Instead, the multidisciplinary speakers—many of whom aren’t traditional “designers”—stand before the audience and lay down the truth, in all its glorious nuances and complexity.

As in past years, the two-day event is a binge-worthy cocktail of design optimism. Presenters unearth high-impact possibilities in everything from citizen science to architecture, poetry to gaming and a teddy bear named Jerry. Created by students of the design education initiative Design for America, Jerry helps children manage their diabetes.

Some presenters—like inventor Van Phillips—plain old blow attendees’ hair back. After losing his foot in an accident, Phillips devoted his life to designing the Flex-Foot, a prosthetic that allows amputees not just to walk comfortably but to compete in the Paralympics.

Richard Satava, professor of surgery, University of Washington, presents a future in which we could grow our own replacement organs—and wonders if we should—while fuseproject’s Yves Béhar adds a halo of celebrity.

But what makes all the exuberance count is that it coexists with honest assessments of what it really takes to create change—and what still needs to happen.

During her presentation, Heather Fleming, founder/CEO of social impact firm Catapult Design, dares challenge the perception that social sector design is necessarily always more rewarding. Don’t get her wrong. She loves her work. But she’s faced some challenging lessons: Funding is an exercise in pulling teeth, for instance. And many of the changes she’s working toward won’t take hold for generations.

Bravely mingling during a break, attendees say it’s exactly what designers and social innovators need to hear.

Later, Sarah Elizabeth Ippel, founder/executive director, Academy for Global Citizenship, a Chicago public charter school with a primarily low-income student population, continues keeping it real. She could easily throw up stats on her students’ extraordinary academic gains and call it a conference.

Instead, she speaks about students she doesn’t have capacity to serve. Framing their lack of access to quality education as nothing short of a civil rights violation, Ippel implores the crowd to take action: “We all live in this nightmare together,” she says.

Warm-fuzzy stats would be more comfortable. But Ippel must figure this crowd can handle the truth. And if by chance the truth gets scary, attendees can always refer back to the blindfolded man who opened CUSP by shouting: “Fear is not a one-time event! It’s a process! And it can motivate us!”

Tiffany Meyers is a journalist who covers advertising, design, business, and culture. You can read her features in Communication Arts, AdAge, 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 tech. In addition to writing, she serves as board president of the nonprofit EPIC, which gives creative professionals the chance to use their talents to make social change happen.

Photography by Audra Melton

Entrepreneur Magazine

Author’s Note: At the height of the recession, business mags were full of tips for keeping small businesses healthy. But what about keeping a healthy mind? To find out how entrepreneurs were (or weren’t) dealing with the emotional stress, I checked in with psychologists and entrepreneurs. This article was more positively received than almost any I’ve written, with a letter to the editor published in the subsequent issue of Entrepreneur. 

In the economic tailspin of the late 2000s, loss is part of life. Workers are losing their jobs, employers are losing their businesses, and as credit becomes more and more scarce, everyone is losing confidence. What’s more, entrepreneurs are grappling with a sense that they’ve lost control of critical factors that could determine their futures.

Those psychological hurdles are perhaps the biggest challenges facing today’s business owners; after all, it was probably that shining confidence and ability to innovate that got you started in the first place, right?

“So much of it has nothing to do with you,” says Tarek Tay, 36, co-owner and managing partner of Atlanta’s Zaya Restaurant, which launched strong in February 2008, boomed through the summer–and then saw business drop 30 percent in September. Although well-reviewed, it has operated in the red since, even with $1.2 million in 2008 sales. “If your food isn’t good, you can improve the quality,” he says. “If service is the problem, you can train your staff. But if the problem is that no one’s going out to eat because of the economy, what can you do?”

As he and his partners fund Zaya with profits from the New Orleans restaurants they also own, Tay works tirelessly on cost cutting and marketing. “It makes me feel like I’m not giving up,” he says. “When I’m out there working and I end up with a busy night, then I get to experience some sense of return. If you sit at home, your worries just fester in your mind.”

In other words, he takes control of what he can. In fact, studies have found that a sense of personal control–the belief that you set your destiny–is one of several characteristics shared by happy people. These days, gaining that sense of control might seem like a tall order. But even when the world is hurtling toward an uncertain future, there’s one thing that’s always and entirely up to you: your perspective on that world. And if you’re an entrepreneur in an economy on the brink, your perspective could be getting a little loopy.

Actually, it’s called cognitive distortion, says Edward Trieber, a clinical psychologist, an attorney and the managing director of Harris, Rothenberg International LLC, which provides integrated solutions, executive coaching, web development and more. Cognitive distortion can cause people under undue stress to discount positive events, seeing only the negative. They also might lose their long-term perspective, focusing exclusively on the immediate fires they’re called upon to douse, or perceive even minor events as major catastrophes. As of late, Trieber’s company has been helping businesses cope with the stress of economic uncertainty. According to the American Psychological Association, nearly half of Americans (47 percent) report that 2008 brought increased stress–with money and the economy topping worry lists–while 30 percent say their stress is extreme.

Think Straight
Your first stop on the cognitive thrill ride: a network of people to talk to, says Trieber–and not for the warm fuzzies. Friends and family can point out when your doomsday scenarios are getting a little too biblical for your own good; they’ll also remind you that you’re more than your work. “When people define themselves by their business,” says Trieber, “they might conclude, ‘If my business isn’t doing well, then I’m not doing well.’”

For every $1 invested in employee wellness programs, companies see a median ROI of $2 to $6.

That’s a precarious position in a volatile economy. But for husband and wife team Eric Haggard, 47, and Kimberly Rock, 42, whose home is security against their Torrington, Connecticut, business lines of credit, work and life really are one and the same. Rock recalls the period before she and Haggard launched their online retail business RealMemories.com as one of the most stressful times of her life.

Today, she realizes the danger of losing her home wasn’t as real as it felt then. “But fear isn’t always rational,” says Rock, whose site, which provides archival-quality custom framing for digital photography, launched with $225,000 and brought in $100,000 in 2008 sales. “For one week, I wallowed in the what-ifs. And it did me absolutely no good.”

Instead, she and Haggard wrote their way through the fear, synthesizing a long- and short-term plan of action. Relief was immediate. “When you put everything on paper,” Rock says, “it’s not floating around in your head as this nebulous, insurmountable set of fears.”

Writing slows your thoughts enough to clarify those that aren’t serving you, says Trieber, while a plan gives you perspective. “If you thought that for the rest of your life, you’d be working in this business environment, things would seem very grim,” he says. “But when you see how things could be in two or five years, it’s easier to tolerate what’s happening now.”

Haggard and Rock, who also own the million-dollar business PulpProducts.com, used to check sales figures daily–sometimes after particularly feverish economic newscasts. Nixing that nervous habit, they now look at sales monthly and quarterly. “With an online retail business, your mood can swing daily,” Haggard says. “When orders are up, you’re up. When orders are down, you’re down. We made a conscious effort to stay positive by looking at the big picture.”

Physical Reaction
At Seattle’s Hyde Evans Design, a small interior design firm with $1.5 million in annual billings, the phones practically forecast the Dow. “There’s a direct correlation between the amount of calls we get and news about the economy,” says founder Barbara Hyde Evans, 55. “When the markets drop, clients start calling to say, ‘Do you think we really need to do such and such? Maybe we could put that off.’”

As Hyde Evans’ high-end residential projects slowed through 2008, she had to lay off an employee and shift to what they’re calling “holiday hours.” Another employee left to become an in-house designer at Starbucks, which seemed to offer more stability. “The stress was getting to the point where I sometimes felt physically ill,” she says.

And she’s not alone. Three quarters of people experience symptoms like headaches or upset stomachs because of stress, according to the APA, which recommends exercise to manage it. For many, that’s tough. According to a national survey from Amway Global, 38 percent of Americans say getting enough exercise is their biggest challenge to healthy living. Not for Hyde Evans. Once weekly, she and her staff members arrive at the office early, move the conference table aside and take a yoga class led by an instructor. “Two of our clients want to join us,” she says. “It hasn’t happened yet, but we joke that we truly are a full-service design firm.”

She’s even found a silver lining around the dreary cloud of slow business: time for all the things–organizing the office, advertising aggressively–that she was too busy for in the past. “It’s an opportunity in that sense,” she says.

“Extreme inflection points always create opportunity,” Trieber says. “Yes, you may have lost something, but there could be something to gain. Look at your situation and say, ‘What positives, if any, are available to me now?’”

The Other Side
This past year, former advertising executive Tami Quinn, 43, and her Pulling Down The Moon co-founder and co-director Beth Heller, 41, watched the SBA’s lending volume drop nearly 30 percent. So this year, the founders of the integrative care for fertility center, which reports 2008 sales of $1.2 million, have had to shelve aspirations for opening a fifth location.

“We’ve had so many challenges that could have threatened our business,” says Quinn, whose center works with doctors to incorporate holistic modalities, like yoga, acupuncture, massage and stress management techniques, into medical fertility treatments. “Every time something like that happens, we turn to each other and say, ‘OK, what’s the opportunity here?’”

In this case, Quinn and Heller decided that if it’s not possible to open a fifth location, they would pour their energy into making sure their four locations were that much more extraordinary. “In yoga, we say you can only go so far into the forest before you start coming out of it,” she says. “Using that line of reasoning, you can see that this economy will only be bad for so long before it starts to get better.”

So keep moving forward. We’ll see you at the clearing up ahead.

Tiffany Meyers is a Chicago writer whose coverage of design, sustainability and business has appeared in venues such as Advertising Age, PINK, Metropolis, HOW, Communication Arts and The Chicago Tribune, among many more. Reach her at tiffanymeyers@verizon.net.

This article was originally published in the April 2009 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: The Psychology of Stress.

Hemispheres Magazine

The fast-growing field of biomimicry encourages innovators to look to nature-in all its wonder and weirdness-for solutions to our trickiest problems.

Longtime New Yorkers remember that riding the subway wasn’t always the shiny experience it is today. Back in the 1970s and early 80s, a group of ghetto kids—armed with spray paint and the pre-PlayStation impulse to create—turned trains into giant, moving canvasses. Thus marked the birth of wild-style graffiti, whose complex letter forms turned the artists (or “writers”) into local celebrities—and enemies of a bureaucracy seeking to regain control of its transit system.

Some 20 years after a mid-’80s crackdown started to deliver spotless trains, graffiti artist Carlos Rodriguez and New York design firm Code and Theory have teamed up to (virtually) rebuild the streets that sparked the movement. Style Wars (www.stylewars.com), which launched in November, is as close as you’re going to get to a tour of the New York City streets circa 1982.

The website takes its name from—and was inspired by—Tony Silver’s 1983 film, Style Wars, which is available for purchase here in its 2003 two-disc DVD format, Style Wars: Revisited, featuring additional footage and interviews. Rodriguez, associate producer of the DVD and Style Wars’ cocreator, says the site pays respect to the pureness of intent in the moment before graffiti was embraced by the mainstream.

“We were making something out of nothing,” says Rodriguez, who appeared in the movie under his tag name, Mare 139. “And that’s what we wanted to illustrate. When I look at breakers flipping on old mattresses, I see that resourcefulness. That’s the emotional draw I was going for.” Today, when corporations including Nike and Coca-Cola tap graffiti artists like Haze and Tats Cru to infuse their brands with street cred, it’s clear, Rodriguez says, that people long for that era’s authenticity.

Like the subject it covers, Style Wars breaks design conventions. The site is presented as one long, single-paged panorama, which moves horizontally through a photographic collage of the urban landscape. The user can stop at features like a gallery of painted trains, discussion boards and interviews with both contemporary artists and legends of the era, updated monthly. Throughout, photographs depict emerging hip-hop culture: the Rock Steady Crew poses; break-dancers show off on dirty mattresses; and a young “Dez,” now Hot 97’s DJ Kay Slay—stands at a turntable. Meanwhile, the concrete walls that serve as a visual backdrop are covered in wild-style art.

“The site is a blueprint of a culture,” he says, “its history and legacy. And people have always looked at documents like this to get a firmer grasp of the pioneers, the roots, the styles and the language. Everyone’s always looking back to inspire them for the future.”

That’s certainly the case on Style Wars’ discussion board, where young graffiti writers post emotional diatribes, as well as original art. They exchange favorite movie quotes, discuss the political nature of their craft and argue the virtues of painting on (or “bombing”) trucks vs. trains—landing eventually on the upshot that “it doesn’t matter, just don’t get caught.” The maxim might also serve for the art form in general.

In less expert hands, the project might have devolved into a vacation slide show: “My Trip to the Ghetto, 1982.” Instead, the viewer is immersed in what Code and Theory creative director Brandon Ralf calls “The Style Wars City.” The collage is assembled from the photography of Henry Chalfant, coproducer of the film, whose hard-earned trust of circumspect graffiti writers can be seen in collections like Subway Art. Credit Chalfant’s photo reportage for the intimacy with which stylewars.com presents an often out-of-reach world.

“Growing up, [finding inspiration] was as simple as jumping on the subway,” says David Villorente, aka Chino BYI, a columnist for The Source. “You could catch this moving gallery to study the art and, from that, create your own style and hone your craft.” He sees the site as a service to people who are too young to have experienced the era firsthand.

As the trains rush by in Style Wars’ Flash-based moving gallery, you can almost hear Detective Bernie Jacobs from the 1983 movie, lodging his nasal complaint, made classic by way of Freudian slip: “Is that an art? I don’t know. I’m not an art crim—critic, but I can sure as hell tell you that’s a crime.” Set that statement against a Chalfant image on Style Wars of a writer in an “Art is not a Crime” T-shirt and you get a feeling of how thick the tensions were.

In the end, graffiti was bigger than any of its pioneers could have anticipated, although subway bombing has become something of a lost art form. “I like to say we lost the war on the trains,” says Rodriguez, “but we won the world.”

HOW Magazine
Success By Design

We’re five years into the new millennium, and the gurus of modern business have at long last decided to agree with IBM’s Thomas Watson Jr., who said that good design is good business. The celebrity CEOs of Apple, Target and Procter & Gamble have carried that torch into the 21st century, leveraging design as a safeguard against the commoditizing forces of the global marketplace. Their stories have been featured in the most authoritative business publications on the newsstands, from Fast Company to BusinessWeek, not to mention in the design trades.

So everyone seems to agree: Good design equals good business. But there’s something about that word, it seems; it introduces a ghost of doubt. Because while CEOs Steve Jobs, Robert Ulrich and A.G. Lafley provide examples of corporate design ambassadorship, one could argue that they have pockets deep enough, and reputations solid enough, to afford taking risks on design.

Still, there are small, quietly successful companies out there that are also staking their business models on design. Business writers haven’t yet spilled much ink on the design philosophies of these companies, including Definitions Gym, Burton Snowboards and Flight 001. But the people driving these enterprises have incorporated a passion for design into their strategic blueprints with as much conviction as the big guys, taking potentially costlier risks, in relative terms, in order to do so.

These aren’t the standard examples of business embracing design. Although Burton Snowboards is known for breaking boundaries, product manager Todd King expresses an atypical statement when he says, “Everything we do is centered on design.”

King captures the common thread among all of these small, design-savvy companies: “You either innovate or you die,” he says. “Companies don’t want to fall or falter and let the competition overcome them. But if you don’t take risks, where you could potentially falter, you’re never going to have the opportunity to distance yourself from the competition.”

Burton Snowboards: Design as Dialogue
In the late 1970s, an aesthetically precocious kid named Scott Schwebel was coming of age in Wisconsin, just as a brand of waffle-soled sneakers called Vans was spreading like wildfire from West Coast skate culture to the heartland. Through the grapevine, Schwebel learned that at the hip BMX bike shops in town, he could design his own kicks, mixing and matching several graphic themes—a checkerboard pattern, maybe, with a Hawaiian look—on a pair of Vans Slip-Ons. “It was this amazing moment,” Schwebel says. “It was like, ‘You can do what?’ You can design your own shoe?’”

Now swoop down and across the Midwest to North Carolina, 1976. There you’ll find 5-year-old Todd King sitting with his parents in a car dealership. Taking very seriously the opportunity to help his parents customize their family Oldsmobile, he informed both dealer and progenitor that no father of his would drive a silver car with a tan interior, as was his parents’ stated preference. No, not on his watch. “It just had this effect on me,” King recalls. “My parents let me have input, and I was like, ‘This is so cool.’”

Today, the two are still geeked about customized design. Schwebel, vice president of creative development at the Milwaukee design firm Hanson Dodge, and King, product manager at Burton Snowboards in Burlington, VT, teamed up with Bryan Rasch, Hanson Dodge vice president of technology, to create Burton Snowboards’ Series 13 for the 2005 season. Using an online tool, snow shredders with enough cash to cover the program’s premium price can personalize every aspect of four high-end, precision-engineered board models, selecting graphics, finishes, sidewall colors and base designs in a virtually infinite number of combinations.

For Schwebel, customized design is the logical next step in what Virginia Postrel, in “The Substance of Style,” christened the “age of aesthetics,” an era in which virtually no product—not even the toilet bowl brush—escapes the market demand for design. “When every product is well-designed,” Schwebel says, “what will make your product more desirable than the other well-designed products? It’s the ability to personalize a product to reflect your values. As a consumable society, that’s what we’re going to demand next. It’s the last frontier of selling mass product.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a culture better suited to custom design than snowboarding or a company better equipped to facilitate the process than Burton. In snowboarding, the equipment itself becomes a sticker-plastered platform on which riders broadcast their attitudes about life, music, fashion and politics. Series 13 is more than a cutting-edge option for a culture that cuts edges as a matter of course. It represents a dramatically different way for the company to communicate with its consumers. As Schwebel explains, customized design programs like it are poised to upend the traditional business-to-consumer paradigm, turning a previously one-way monologue—where companies “push out”—into a dynamic conversation. And as more companies dip their toes in the water, perfecting the delivery system along the way, the trend, as Schwebel says, “is going to blow up.”

How did Burton develop its risk-taking culture?
Todd King: The one thing I can point to—and we always talk about this—is that if you have a question about the decision you’re making, you can just step back and say, “What would Jake [Burton, company founder] do?” It’s a perfect litmus test. He wants the company to go full-speed ahead and embrace change. There’s a general philosophy here to hire creative people, because everything we do is based on design. It’s always been about making things that work, as well as making them look good. If you can do both successfully, then you’ve got it.

Tell us about your work with Hanson Dodge.
They were the quickest learners I’ve worked with. There are very few firms that get the term “standing sideways.” If you have to ask the question, “What’s standing sideways?” then you’ll probably never get it.

OK, so we gotta ask . . .
[He laughs.] Standing sideways is the way you ride the board, but it’s also the mentality of the youth culture. Independent. Renegade. We think and do things in ways that aren’t conventional. Hanson Dodge had never worked with a client that was as creative as Burton. When you work with a client that’s as creative as we are, it can be crazy. They’d come to our offices and be like, “Why do you have that stuffed, flying pig over your desk?” It’s just the way we do things.

In 1988, Tibor Kalman, designer Emily Oberman, and intern Scott Stowell were frequently left at New York’s Ceasar Video without adult supervision in the middle of the night. They were working at the edit facility on M&Co.’s music video for the Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers,” a typographically driven solution that would both break new ground and take an inordinate amount of time to produce.

Kalman had arranged a deal whereby M&Co. could use the facility 24 hours a day during the video’s production, giving them the run of the place after business hours—and often past 4 a.m. Hilarity of the kind that accompanies caffeine and overwork ensued. And Oberman recalls one night in particular, when Kalman removed every poster from every wall in the facility—Joseph Beuys prints, if her memory serves—and rehung each piece upside down.

When Ceasar Video staffers arrived for work the next day, there was intrigue and confusion—and finally, the decision to embrace the upended art. “And for as long as I continued to go to that facility, it stayed up that way,” says Oberman, now partner of Number 17 in New York, whose term at M&Co. from 1987 to 1993 was the longest run of any employee in the firm’s 14-year lifespan.

M&Co.’s sprawling mythology brims with antics along these lines, many with the same Marx Brothers’ quality. But the story of Ceasar Video and the art on its walls is a particularly tidy metaphor for Kalman’s preternatural ability to wrench audiences out of what they’d come to rely on as proper and right.

JUST EXACTLY NOT QUITE RIGHT
Graphic design in the 1980s was drowning in varnish. A blind reverence for expensive production values had begun to supersede content. And from 1979 to 1993, M&Co. scoured the gloss off those surfaces. As Peter Hall and others have noted, the firm’s signature style is often purported to be a lack thereof—or at least mutable in nature, largely dependent on the designers who worked there at any given time—but the oeuvre is unified by an overarching desire to “strip away the designer’s habit to make things line up or to be satisfied if it’s just pretty,” says Alexander Isley, who worked at M&Co. from 1984 to 1986 and today runs Alexander Isley Inc.

That sensibility drove projects large and small. For the 42nd Street Development Project, Kalman’s signage guidelines promoted not uniformity but the kaleidoscopic, mismatched mayhem of the street’s past. For Restaurant Florent, M&Co.’s 1986 postcards—printed on cheap, brown cardboard stock, featuring icons Isley drew from the yellow pages—flew in the face of the glitz and glam of New York City’s culinary culture.

Even printers were entrenched. When M&Co. cooked up the idea to print Florent’s matchbooks inside out—cardboard brown on the outside, that gorgeous gloss wasting away on the interior—it was diffcult to convince the printer to do so, “because that just wasn’t the way things were done,” says Isley. “It rocked their world that we were asking them to run the paper upside down. I wasn’t even convinced they were going to do it until the matchbooks showed up.”

Oberman remembers that Kalman—who famously entered the profession without a formal design education—aimed for what he called “just exactly not quite right,” and for 14 years, M&Co. designers worked in that vein under Kalman’s unrelenting style of creative direction thinking about things in the ostensibly wrong way with the intent to land on a more honest, more interesting kind of right.

“I hate all those expressions like ‘Think outside the box,’” says Stowell, an intern in 1988 and M&Co. designer from 1990 to 1993, “because I think the notion of accepting the fact that there’s a box in the first place is a big problem people have in general. And what you’re talking about with M&Co. is people who didn’t recognize—or care—that that box existed.”

CONSTANT EVOLUTION
When he joined M&Co. in 1983, Stephen Doyle, creative director of Doyle Partners, recalls walking into Kalman’s 57th Street office to see a gash in the wall behind the receptionist’s area, created with what he suspects were blunt axes. “It looked like a cartoon,” he says, “where Superman had just flown through the wall. So the minute you walked in the office, you saw this architectural wrongness to begin with.”

Two weeks after his arrival, Kalman fired every designer on staff but Doyle. There was, as Doyle says, “a lot of grid action happening at M&Co. at the time, and Tibor—untrained as a designer—wasn’t interested in the grid. He wasn’t interested in formalism.” Nor was Doyle. His arrival—followed by new hires Tom Kluepfel and Isley, Doyle’s former Cooper Union student—is associated with the first of many shifts in M&Co.’s evolution, this one a swing into its conceptual positioning.

Few discussions of M&Co.’s legacy fail to include accounts of Kalman’s raucous, confrontational, and sometimes self-contradictory attacks on contemporary design practice in the late 1980s, when he encouraged designers to be bad and to subvert what they’d come to accept as the design process. It’s difficult at first to reconcile that persona with Isley’s memory of his boss at early AIGA events around 1984, which has Kalman standing self-consciously in the corner, put off by the clubby atmosphere he never felt a part of. It’s a stark contradiction, but the connection between those two snapshots of Kalman—blending into the walls of AIGA or busting through them—is his outsider status, fiercely maintained and in many ways the foundation on which his celebrity is built.

Doyle, too, situated himself in the fringes of the rarified world of graphic design. “I never felt like I was a part of the design canon,” says Doyle, who had worked at Rolling Stone and Esquire magazines prior to joining M&Co., “so I was ready to try anything. And it didn’t matter to me a whole heck of a lot if I failed at something, because I never thought I was going to go all that far anyway. I used to play at work, and the designers with a capital D at the time worked at work. That’s not to say I didn’t take it seriously, but I took it seriously as play.”

Among other things, Doyle brought a classical sense of typography to M&Co., which he employed in the creation of sophisticated visual incongruities. On the cover of the Talking Heads album Little Creatures, his use of Torino against the painting by folk artist Howard Finster seemed antithetical to instinct. His cacophonous album-cover design for a Thelonious Monk compilation—one of the most layered mechanicals he ever did, Doyle says—had nothing to do with professional, “capital D” design.

“I was delighted to make things wrong by heading in the opposite direction of what was going on around me,” he says. “It was the ‘80s and it was nasty. People were doing very collage-y stuff and lots of stair-steppy things. Everything had a grid—and by grid I mean a graph-paper kind of grid. Makes me crazy, that stuff.”

To Doyle and Isley, M&Co. felt so removed from commercial practices—so “outsider art,” as Doyle puts it—that neither appreciated the impact their work was about to have. “We were totally flying by the seat of our pants,” says Doyle, “making things up as we went along.” It wasn’t until 1986, when Kalman organized the Fresh Dialogue conference at AIGA, that Isley realized M&Co.’s reputation as the anti-design firm—and Kalman the anti-designer—had captured the imagination of the design community it had very little to do with until then.

The invitation, printed on cheesy paper with bad letterspacing, promised “Design Without Designers: or How I Learned to Stop Letterspacing and Love the Non.” To a sold-out audience in FIT’s Katie Murphy Amphitheater, 24-year-old Isley presented a slide show of disassembled cardboard boxes in a discussion of “unseen design,” created without regard for aesthetics or audience. Other presentations similarly extracted examples of vernacular design—including the auto magazine Hemmings Motor News, as crude in design as it is beloved by car enthusiasts—from their intended contexts to examine and appreciate them in a formal sense.

“It was one of those few times in your life when you feel you’re doing the right thing,” Isley says. “We were behind this guy who maybe wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing himself, but he was pushing against stuff. And those of us who were there wanted to see if you could love and hate graphic design at the same time. Can you know there’s something better out there even if you’re not sure what it is?”

TYPOGRAPHERS USING TYPE
Kalman frequently said he didn’t like to work on the same kind of project more than twice. “The first one,” he told Kurt Andersen in an interview in his monograph Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, “you fuck it up in an interesting way; the second one, you get it right; and then you’re out of there.” As Kalman continued to insert himself in areas in which he lacked expertise—culminating in his role as editor in chief of Benetton’s Colors, where he found full expression and corporate sponsorship for his vision of design as a means to provide relevant content to a world suffering from its dearth—the improvisational quality that Isley and Doyle brought to bear continued to shape M&Co.’s output.

In a real sense, “(Nothing But) Flowers” was informed by a lack of insider information. While Oberman had studied filmmaking at Cooper Union, neither she nor Kalman had produced a music video before.

“In hindsight,” says Oberman, “I look at that video and think, ╘Wow, we really didn’t know what we were doing.’” The video—in which the lyrics move across the screen as the band performs in a stark set—pushes typography into the role of a dynamic, narrative device.

When David Byrne sings that years ago he pretended he was a billboard against the side of the road, for example, the type—projected directly onto Byrne’s face—dramatizes the lyric, essentially turning him into the billboard he says he pretended to be.

From a production standpoint, the technology that facilitated those now-basic special effects was in its infancy, rendering the concept inconvenient to produce, at best. It’s also likely that those inside the music video industry would have rejected the typographical approach as too quaint, or “bouncing ball-y,” Oberman says. “It wasn’t someone in spandex busting a move. But because we were designers and typographers, it seemed like an interesting way to tell the story.”

To hear M&Co. designers’ recollections, there’s often the distinct sense that the ground they broke was more stumbled on than sought out. Stowell, who would later serve as art director of Colors magazine in Italy from 1993 to 1994, recalls that his former boss once said, “Everything I do is motivated by this.” Kalman then thrust his middle finger in the air in defiance of any mite of establishment thinking that might have been floating therein. Certainly, that general outlook infused the atmosphere with a spirit of purposeful insubordination. And certainly, very little of what Kalman did to upset the established order—including his inclination to work in categories whose conventions he didn’t know from the inside—was accidental.

The perception among those on the outside was that M&Co. designers were on a crusade to shock the world with their messianic, anticorporate message. In reality, they were often just doing what they did. They were typographers, in other words, using typography in a music video. Because Kalman cultivated an upside-down way of looking at things—and because M&Co. designers often shared the inclination to do so—”what they did” invariably countered prevailing standards. “There wasn’t the sense that this is the way things are done, so let’s do them differently,” says Stowell, who today runs his design studio Open in New York. “It wasn’t as though we’d get a job and figure out a way to give everyone the finger. We were just doing good work, or trying to do good work, and Tibor was doing the same thing.”

INTELLECTUAL CONTORTIONISM
There was, in fact, a rightness to much of what went on at M&Co., whose ranks were filled with impeccably trained designers, many of whom had cut their teeth at corporate identity firms. Colorblind though it was, Kalman’s eye had an otherwise precision-engineered quality, including an ability, which Douglas Riccardi, principal of Memo Productions, describes as “admirably, freakishly, scarily good,” to zero in on the one concept, among hundreds of sketches, that was incontestably right. “To me,” says Oberman, “that talent was as important as having done the sketch in the first place. He could take a great idea and make it better.

And often it would be better because he pushed it a little bit more in the wrong direction.”

That so many M&Co. designers were versed in the rules put the firm in a more authoritative position to break them. Amid the piles of portfolios M&Co. amassed daily—one festooned in pink faux fur, another bursting with fake album covers—there would be a lone manila folder from a Swisstrained designer. “And that would be the person Tibor would hire,” says Riccardi, who himself had worked at corporate identity firm Anspach Grossman Portugal prior to joining M&Co. in 1986. “It allowed the design process to stay where it should,” he says, “which is at the conceptual level. If we came to grips with the concept, if we agreed on whatever it was we were trying to achieve, he would trust that we’d pick the right typefaces and colors, but we didn’t waste too much time talking about those things. So I think that part of his ╘thinking wrong’ was that he was just thinking, period.”

As creative vice president of Bumble and bumble Alexander Brebner remembers, working at M&Co. required that he suspend what years of training had taught him as proper and right. During his tenure from 1986 to 1991, he spent a good deal of time wondering whether his work was “wrong enough, or wrong in the right way,” a process he describes as a kind of intellectual contortionism, both draining and liberating. “It can be exhausting to incorporate that kind of ╘thinking wrong’ into your ethos,” he says. “You have to constantly be prepared to ask if there’s another way. And of course there always is, but you have to dig and dig. You have to go through the looking glass and put yourself in a backward context in order to contort your thinking.”

ANGEL OR DEVIL
To this day, Kalman’s creative direction is part of Brebner’s process, an inner critic he calls “either a Tibor angel or devil” that sits on his shoulder, questioning whether his work could be better, different, whether he’s settling for just good enough. While the intensity of that voice has diminished in recent years, Brebner says that one look at Kalman’s portrait on the cover of Perverse Optimist, from which his former boss smiles up at him, is enough to activate the running commentary.

Upon Kalman’s untimely death in 1999, a reporter from TIME called Doyle to see if he might provide a few famous examples of this celebrated designer’s work, projects that the mainstream would recognize. For a moment, Doyle was tempted to fabricate a list of all the familiar work—the Exxon and IBM logos, for example, and the Heinz ketchup bottle—that Kalman never produced. Had Doyle succumbed to the temptation, the stunt might well have made the point that M&Co. operated neither for nor in the mainstream but against its grain. It also would have raised a one-fingered salute to the establishment, one last time, on Kalman’s behalf. “It would have been a fitting tribute,” says Doyle, “But ultimately, I knew TIME had a weapon against that kind of thinking: fact checkers.”

ABOUT THE IMAGES SHOWN

THE ASKEW WATCH: M&Co. watches were a studio-wide effort for which designers created sketches during their down time. Alexander Brebner, who still wears his Askew watch most days, has made a sport of observing people’s cartoon, double-take reactions to Isley’s design of that watch model, on the face of which the numbers appear in jumbled order. It takes a moment for people to realize why the Askew watch feels wrong, Brebner says, “and then the response is either delight that someone felt they could do that—take a basic rule of society, something as established as a clock face, and just turn it on its head. Or they’re totally disturbed for the same reason. People think, ╘I couldn’t possibly tell time wearing that thing.’” Properly placed numbers aren’t, in fact, a requisite for time telling, but the numerical disorder, like much of M&Co.’s work, astounds people out of the stupor of habit. “The task was to define the thing or the element of the watch that could make it more than a watch,” says Brebner, “to take the mundane act of telling time and make it more difficult, more interesting, or less of an automatic.”

JOB SHEETS: Job sheets from M&Co.’s weekly meetings. This one is from July 1988, when Oberman was working on no fewer than 10 projects, highlighted in orange. The green numbers on the left indicate the priorities she and Kalman worked out together. “The weekly office meeting was the time you got to get together and laugh and figure things out,” she says. “The job sheets were an important marker of life at M&Co. Each one is like a snapshot of the week.”

AIGA HUMOR SHOW POSTER: For Isley, the assignment to design the poster for the 1986 AIGA Humor Show was like being shoved on a stage, then ordered to be funny. Rather than crafting a funny image with a funny punchline—the predictable, and in many ways natural, approach—he exploited the possibility of humor in his audience’s recognition of a shared bad experience.

Metropolis Magazine
Free Space

A Chicago nonprofit creates a liberating environment for people with disabilities.

The building that houses Chicago’s Access Living, a nonprofit that provides services for and is staffed by people with disabilities, sits at the architectural intersection of sustainable and universal design—but you wouldn’t know it. And that’s the point. “A basic principle of universal design is that an environment shouldn’t make a person with a disability stand out as different,” says Richard Lehner, a partner at Chicago’s LCM Architects. “So the building itself shouldn’t stand out from any other office building either.”

That was core knowledge for LCM, which specializes in barrier-free spaces, but when Lehner and fellow partner John H. Catlin set out to incorporate green features into their plans–a requisite from the city of Chicago, which sold Access Living the site at a discount-they discovered a powerful synergy between the two design paradigms.

It started with the site: proximity to public transportation, an asset for people with disabilities, also contributed to the project’s Silver LEED submission. A two-week pre-­occupancy building flush did as well-an obvious benefit for people with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS).

Energy-efficient features also had unanticipated overlap: the lighting sensors that balance artificial with natural levels, for instance, inherently offer high-quality light for people with visual impairments.

The zoned ventilation system provides additional climate control for people with a compromised ability to regulate their body temperature, including those with quadriplegia. But there is no single solution to such complex issues. “We learned that what works for one disability doesn’t always work for another,” Lehner says.

That’s nowhere more apparent than in the flooring. LCM discovered through research that carpeting, contrary to popular belief, serves people with MCS by trapping contaminants that would otherwise remain airborne. It also offers traction for people using canes. “But carpeting can be difficult to negotiate with a wheelchair,” says Catlin, who eventually found samples over which his own chair wheels could roll easily.

But when LCM presented these to the Access Living staff, one pattern triggered a seizure for an employee with epilepsy. The solution for that-a more muted pattern by Lees-posed yet another challenge: ensuring there was still enough contrast on hallway borders to help guide people with visual impairments.

Along with earning the Paralyzed Veterans of America’s Barrier-Free America Award and AIA Chicago’s Sustainable Design Award, the building has generated interest from architects, who wonder, What’s the cost of designing this way? “Because we put a lot of thought into every feature up-front, virtually every product is commercially available,” Catlin says. “If there was additional cost, it was minimal.”

Some would argue it’s simply the direction things are taking. “It’s inevitable that two of the most powerful design trends of our day-sustainability and universal access-will merge and change how things are done,” says architect and planner Doug Farr, who chairs LEED for Neighborhood Devel­op­ment, the first LEED program to devote a credit to universal accessibility. “That’s evidence that it’s al­ready happening,” he adds.

Ultimately, Access Living’s areas of overlap stem from a basic theoretical intersection: better, healthier buildings for everyone. “In many ways this work space is more accessible than my own apartment,” says Access Living employee Susan Nussbaum, who uses a wheelchair. “It’s really liberating. And of course a building can be liberating because my freedom is directly relational to my environment.”

If the downturn is hurting your entrepreneurial spirit, we have good news for you: Recessions are historically ripe with opportunity for innovation. Don’t believe us? Read on.

Change Your Mindset. The economy tanks. You have two options: hole up in a bunker and hope it ends before you run out of tinned peas, or innovate and emerge stronger than when the economy took the hit. “During a recession, people tend to say, ‘Let’s stop everything and save money until it’s over,’” says Bernard Meyerson, vice president and CTO of IBM’s systems and technology group. “Well, you’re not going to save your way to greatness.” But you can innovate your way there. So stop moping and heed our experts’ advice. Here are three steps that’ll help you focus on innovation rather than recession woes.

Take a Reality Check. “Love the lows,” the experts proclaim. “Relish the recessions.” Given the national mood, even Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David comes across as more sensitive. In fact, before you relish anything, “make sure your core business is strong,” says Susan Schuman, CEO of innovation and leadership firm SYPartners. “Protect your core, because only then will you have the capacity to innovate.”

Don’t Go It Alone. There’s the romantic notion of innovation: lone genius, devising the idea of the century–from a tool shed. Then there’s reality. “Innovation is actually much more complex,” says Edward Bevan, vice president of innovation and market insight at IBM. “Increasingly, it’s the integration of technology, business models and pro-cesses–all wrapped together. It’s very difficult for any one entity to do that alone.”

Bevan ought to know. He oversaw IBM’s 2008 “Innovation Jam,” an online gathering of thinkers who generated far-ranging ideas from which IBM will extract solutions that all participants can use. Few entrepreneurs could erect an IBM-size jam, but the guiding principle applies: “We believe that if we pool our wisdom, we’ll end up with better results,” Bevan says.

If IBM, with its vast internal resources, thinks it’s important to reach beyond its borders to fill gaps, it stands to reason that entrepreneurs should, too. Gather diverse thinkers around a table to create a “public commons of ideas,” says Bevan.

Play To Your Strengths. “A recession is an especially good time for entrepreneurs to build loyal followers,” says Thomas Koulopoulos, founder of strategic business consulting firm Delphi Group and author of The Innovation Zone: How Companies Re-Innovate for Amazing Success. Big companies, often good at community building, will be distracted during a downturn. “But when the economy recovers, everyone will go after that audience–and if you already own it, that gives you tremendous leverage.”

Robert Wolfe, 38, founder of Madison Heights, Michigan-based outdoor equipment and apparel retailer Moosejaw Mountaineering, agrees. He built a loyal community around his brand by squeezing every pixel of opportunity out of Web 2.0. His innovative marketing, known as “Moosejaw Madness,” spans text campaigns, a blog and “Daily Remark” on moosejaw.com, among other initiatives.

In the 2000s, many larger retailers responded to the dotcom implosion by discounting extensively. Instead of battening down the hatches, Wolfe ratcheted up the madness. “For our survival, innovation was imperative,” he says of his close to $40 million company. “We made sure our customers knew we were still at it and as crazy as ever. And I think it’s going to work out the same way this time around.”??In this economy, Wolfe won’t pursue everything on his innovation to-do list.” But we think we’re good at Moosejaw Madness,” he says. “I’d say that if you’re good at three things on your list, don’t skimp on those three. Innovate around whatever you’re best at.”

FIVE STEPS TO INNOVATION
1. Apply Rigor. According to management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., 36 percent of top managers say they govern innovation in an ad hoc manner. “We often think that if we throw people in a room and ask them to brainstorm, they’ll innovate,” says Thomas Koulopoulos, founder of strategic business consulting firm Delphi Group. Yes, they’ll generate ideas, but ideas don’t have legs by which to leap off the white board. To be more hit than miss, establish a companywide process to brainstorm, test and implement ideas. Sound daunting? Get training at dicor.org, ideachampions.com, innovationmasterclass.com and strategyninstitute.com.

2. Go Where Consumers Go. When one of SYPartners’ clients, a bank, sought to reach the Hispanic market, the innovation and leadership firm sent executives to a Hispanic neighborhood with undocumented workers. Observing challenges these workers faced in dealing with banks, the execs saw unmet needs they couldn’t have spotted from the corner office.

3. Learn From Other Industries. When the executives realized the extent to which the Hispanic market was community-driven, SYPartners had them look not at another bank, but at community trailblazer eBay. In other words, if you want your clothing company to cultivate superior service, have tea at the Ritz. If you want to attract top talent, see how Procter & Gamble does it.

4. Test Your Idea. Take experts’ counsel: Long before you fall in love with your idea, show it to consumers to see if they will, too. Cash-strapped markets don’t suffer bad ideas gladly. That makes a period of decline–with its intense selection pressures–a great time to test ideas. Says Susan Schuman, CEO of SYPartners, “The good ideas rise to the top, and the bad ones go away quickly.”

5. Get A Leading Edge. According to Boston Consulting Group, leaders who successfully cultivate innovation have the ability to change, tolerate ambiguity, assess and be comfortable with risk, balance passion and objectivity, and command respect. If you don’t fit that description, appoint someone who does.

Advertising Age
Marketing to women: If she’s happy, then everybody’s happy.
By Tiffany Meyers

Author’s Note: Women expect a lot from their products and services. So when marketers create offerings to meet women’s criteria first, they’re likely to have something that other demographics will go for, too. That’s the premise of this piece, the cover for Ad Age’s 2006 special report on marketing to women.

For all that blather about alpha males, adult men are a beta demo. There are 6 million more women aged 20 or older than males. What makes the 21st century woman a consumer phenomenon is her own deep pockets, born of greater education and clout in the workplace. The rise of the female consumer phenom–or she-nom–merits an overhaul in strategic thinking. Marketers must keep feminine preferences in mind not just for “women’s products,” but for items ranging from digital cameras to beer, that have traditionally been pitched aggressively to guys.

“The concept of marketing to women as your lead user is the way of the future,” says Bridget Brennan, founder of consultancy Female Factor Communications. In virtually every category, smart marketers will put women in the bull’s-eye, not on the periphery, she says.

Many marketers fear that direct appeals to women will alienate men, but the opposite is true, Ms. Brennan says. Products with a feminine veneer are apt to turn off not just men but women who suspect these are watered-down versions of the real deal, she says.

Women value comfortable retail environments, easy-to-use products, and-the biggest missed opportunity for those seeking to build buzz among women, says Ms. Brennan-superior service. Not even the burliest man could dismiss these gender-neutral features as too girly.

“If you are meeting women’s expectations, you’re giving men something they didn’t even think to ask for,” she says.

Look at the stereotypically male bastion of consumer electronics. Women play a role in initiating electronics purchases in 45% of cases, translating to about $68 billion, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

When they hit stores, women cycle through a range of emotions: “Confident” tops the chart at 60%, but they report feeling “stupid/confused” (41%), “sensory overload” (39%), “anxiety ridden” (18%) ad “bored” (23%), according to CEA.

While no self-respecting geek would know it, Sony Style Stores were built from the ground up around women’s priorities. Far from “feminine, fussy pink,” however, the environments are lifestyle-based, says Dennis Syracuse, senior VP-Sony retail stores.

To assuage women’s techno-trepidation, Sony’s 36 U.S. retail operations draw inspiration from women’s high-end fashion boutiques, featuring a service-oriented concierge desk and elegant displays. As part of the retailer’s aim to demystify technology for female consumers, signage translates jargon, “which is what women want to hear.” Increasingly, adds Mr. Syracuse, so too do men.

Plasma screens sit in lush living-room settings, allowing customers to imagine the products at home, and wider aisles accommodate strollers. “Environments created with women in mind will often be family-friendly,” Mr. Syracuse says. “And [in] family-friendly environments, men will be comfortable as well.”

Sony’s previous foray into the U.S. retail scene consisted of a showcase site on Chicago’s tony Michigan Avenue, with a limited amount of merchandise for sale. That operation has closed, replaced by the more purchase-friendly Sony Style Stores, including two in the Chicago area.

Rather than shock-and-awe volume, the Sony Style Stores still offer a tightly edited selection, based on Sony’s research into women’s top requisites for technology. “But we found that men wanted the same things,” Mr. Syracuse says. Both sexes want gadgets to be “light, easy to use and mobile.”

Women, and marketers, feel less compelled to pursue the male mystique. When Cynthia Good, founding editor of women’s business magazine Pink, began her career in TV news in the 1980s, she donned her navy power suit with floppy bow tie and even consciously lowered her voice. Women at the time “felt that if they were more ‘manly,’ they’d have a better chance of success,” she recalls. “So when marketers tried to sell me products, I wanted to buy and think like a man.”

Today, the floppy bow tie is gone, and women “don’t want to be men in suits anymore,” she says. Nor, she adds, do women want messages designed for men, and that’s putting pressure on advertisers to change.

Pink, which Ms. Good launched in 2005 with founding Publisher Genevieve Bos, reports that its business-savvy female readers’ median personal income is $75,000 and their median household income is $125,000.

Given the many general-business magazines, some marketers initially wondered “why they needed to advertise in a business magazine for women,” Ms. Good says. But increasingly, marketers understand that businesswomen’s priorities differ from their male counterparts’, particularly in their strong desire for work-life balance.

KPMG aligned with Pink to build awareness among businesswomen, who are increasingly making decisions about professional services, says Christine St.Clare, advisory partner at KPMG.

The agreement also demonstrates the company’s commitment to women in business. In addition to advertising in Pink, KPMG is the national sponsor of the 2006 second annual Pink Conference Series.

Veteran agency executive Mary Lou Quinlan emphasizes the value of viral marketing efforts for reaching women, but she cautions that success depends on a campaign’s authenticity.

Pay a so-called “brand ambassador” to talk up a spirits brand at a bar and the effort will fizzle fast. “Women are smarter than that,” says Ms. Quinlan, founder and CEO of Just Ask a Woman, a marketing-to-women consultancy in New York.

SABMiller’s Peroni Nastro Azzurro, a premium beer imported from Italy, leaves the “brand ambassador” approach-not to mention traditional category norms-in the dust.

Traditional beer marketing, reliant on sophomoric humor, bikini babes or some combination thereof, has largely ignored the female consumer base, says Elina Maniec, Peroni brand manager at SABMiller’s Miller Brewing Co.

But not Peroni. As part of SABMiller’s $50 million global campaign for the brand, U.S. efforts targeted “modern sophisticates” of both sexes in Atlanta, New York, San Francisco and Miami. The result is putting women on a fashionable, more equal footing with men in the campaign.

The marketing, inspired by Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” injects the beer-drinking experience with a shot of “effortless Italian style,” Ms. Maniec says.

Peroni struck a two-year deal with fashion event producer IMG Fashion to be the exclusive beer sponsor of Fashion Week events in New York, Miami and Los Angeles.

In addition to product sampling during this past September’s Fashion Week in New York, key promotional staff wore limited-edition Peroni caps designed by Italian hat brand La Coppola Storta, giving typically style-starved beer merchandise a makeover di modo Italiano.

Traditional media included billboards, a 30-second TV spot, and ads in chic venues like W, Black Book, Men’s Vogue and Surface. The effort also included window displays in posh fashion retailers like Diesel and Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and a “La Dolce Vita”-inspired mini-film, viewable online and, coinciding with a swank campaign launch party in June, as a building projection in New York.

London-based creative boutique The Bank handled the campaign’s creative; Starcom Worldwide, Chicago, handles media placement.

Linking Peroni to fashion instead of football shows that a macho marketer like SABMiller can go beyond testosterone as a propellant.

Ms. Maniec says that although Fashion Week and style in general naturally appeal to women, “our fashion-forward male friends are also intrigued by the stylish element of the brand’s advertising tactic.”

By tapping the common interest in Italian elegance among modern sophisticates, she says, “the campaign transcends genders” and puts both sexes “on equal ground.”

SIDEBAR
Power to the female people
Increasing success in their careers means that women have more of their own money to spend-not just their husbands’ income as in the distant past-according to Peter Francese, demographic trends analyst for Ogilvy & Mather, New York.

By the numbers:

• There are more than 110 million women aged 20 or older in the U.S., vs. 104 million men
• Women account for 47% of all workers, filling 51% of jobs in the higher-paying “management, professional and related occupations”
• Of 27.2 million married couples with children under age 18, 71% of the women are in the work force
• Women are the heads of 30% of all U.S. households, exercising total control of those finances
• The number of women under age 65 earning more than $75,000 annually has doubled from 1.9 million in 2000 to 3.8 million in 2005
• Women outnumber men by almost 2-to-1 among the 40% of undergraduates aged 25 or older

Sources: Peter Francese, U.S. Census Bureau, American Council on Education

Metropolis Magazine

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.

Michelle Kaufmann presented her smart homes, which have the Sierra Club calling her “the Henry Ford of green homes.” Biomimicry expert Whitney Hopkins posited that, if designers and companies started emulating nature, we’d “take care of the planet that will take care of our offspring.” And if there were a molecule of pretension within a mile radius, it vaporized when tattooed Mayor John Fetterman of Braddock, Pennsylvania—more death metal, sartorially, than municipal—talked about revitalizing his community.

The 27 presentations were diverse in the extreme (included in the mix: gansta-scholar Baba Brinkman, who rapped about Darwin), making manifest CUSP’s tagline, “a conference about the design of everything.” But a commonality surfaced: The story of careers progressing according to plan, until some problematic truth made it impossible to stay the course.

Fresh from school, Natalia Allen won acclaim for her high-tech apparel. Soon, though, she had misgivings about fashion’s relationship to the environment. “We’ve been taught to design recklessly,” she said. “We move from season to season, reverie to reverie, inspiration to inspiration.” Allen founded Design Futurist to upend that standard, creating sustainable solutions for the likes of Calvin Klein.

Having trained at Johns Hopkins, Jay Parkinson was primed for a doctor’s life, healing with scalpels and pills. But he realized Americans were dying of conditions that start with behavior, like obesity. And since scalpels and pills don’t change behavior…. Well, so much for linear career trajectories. His Future Well designs solutions to help people live happier, not just longer, lives.

Then there’s Tim Will, who had only just retired—envisioning a quiet farm life—when he met his new neighbors, Appalachian farmers crushed by the U.S. food distribution system. Enter retirement Plan B. His Foothills Connect Business & Technology Center trains farmers to sell high-end produce to chefs. Having eliminated the middleman, these small farmers take home more per unit and thrive.

“What’s the purpose of your life’s swamp?” Ivers semi-shouted in his keynote. And if CUSP had a primary takeaway, it would be that, once you find it, innovation follows.

At the risk of sounding sauced on conference Kool-Aid, one last thing: CUSP provided a rare chance to feel part of something bigger than its facts. It was, in fact, a “conference,” for instance. But that’s an anemic descriptor for how it played out, as a 48-hour mosh pit of neural activity and design optimism. By the end of day two, people were just as swamped as Mossman—with ideas, inspiration and connections.

All images courtesy Audra Melton.

What’s on designer don’t lists? Five designers share their list of verboten materials — along with the alternatives they use instead.

Never say never? Well, not unless your hand is forced. Think chinchilla fur. Or popcorn ceilings. Sometimes, “over my dead body” is the only reasonable option. We asked five designers to name the one material that they would never, ever, not for a pile of money and a lifetime supply of cake, use in an interior. Then we found out what they’d go for instead. The common thread: authenticity. Each in their way, these designers confirm the importance of honesty in materials.

Use this: Authentic materials
Not that: Counterfeits

Tom Polucci, director of interior design, HOK Chicago, can’t say there’s one specific material he’d rule out altogether. Rather, he believes in using authentic materials wherever possible, whether reclaimed or locally sourced. “What’s great is that, today, we have so many products available to us,” he says.

For wood flooring alone, Polucci can choose from solid wood, end grain wood, cork or bamboo. But not every budget can accommodate wood flooring. What then? Polucci finds a different but equally authentic solution: He might leave the concrete floors exposed, for instance, or recommend linoleum, a floor covering made of renewable materials.

“Using an authentic material in an unconventional way is also a great way to create more impact,” he adds. For HOK’s office, the firm reclaimed some teak flooring, using the warm, salvaged wood to create a striking wall panel at the entrance. And in a beneficent twist, it would have cost more to make custom veneer panels than it did to repurpose the solid teak flooring.

Use this: Wood flooring
Not that: Wall-to-wall carpeting

In the past, Ron Radziner, design principal at Los Angeles’ Marmol Radziner Architects, avoided wall-to-wall carpeting because of the chemicals involved. But even now, with greener options on the market, Radziner steers clear for the sake of the space. “Wall-to-wall always has a sense of being temporary,” he says. “You know it’s going to be replaced in a couple of years.”

Does it ever work? Well, maybe in a very chic, sexy bedroom that calls for ultraplush materials. But ultimately, Radziner prefers wood floors. If a room starts getting too hard-surface-y, you can always throw down a rug.

Radziner is excited about developments in engineered wood flooring, which looks and feels like solid wood but is higher performing and more ecologically responsible. The brands he likes — Schotten & Hansen, Stile and Exquisite Surfaces — use only a layer of slow-growing hardwood, thereby saving resources. That layer is placed atop a subsurface of fast-growing wood. In climates that swing from hot to cold, an engineered wood floor is more stable than ever-expanding and contracting solid wood. “In five or six years, I think it’s really going to be all that there is,” says Radziner.

Use this: Velvet
Not that: Ultrasuede

They say ultrasuede is a miracle fabric: stain resistant and ultradurable. For Sarah Richardson, host and co-producer of “Sarah’s House” on HGTV and principal of Toronto’s Sarah Richardson Design, it’s plain old ick. “I’m always drawn to natural materials and shy away from anything that’s trying to be something else,” she says. “Impostors and fakes aren’t invited to my design party.”

When a room calls for fabrics with a soft, cushy texture, she’d far rather use velvet, which she loves for its natural richness and Old World elegance. It also happens to give ultrasuede a run for its money in the durability department. “Cotton velvet wears like iron,” says Richardson. Options with an antiqued or strie face are even more forgiving.

The only place that she hasn’t used velvet: on the walls. And now that she’s thought of it, the walls had better look out. “I can’t think of anywhere I wouldn’t use velvet, except maybe my kitchen stools — I’ve got little girls with sticky fingers.”

Use this: Orchids, indoor plants
Not that: Fake flowers

Nothing brings a room down faster than the use of artificial flowers or plants, says Jan Showers, president of Dallas’ Jan Showers & Associates. “I’ve seen rooms with incredibly expensive furnishings and a large fake plant in the corner,” says Showers. “Suddenly, the room has lost something valuable: authenticity.”

She understands the impulse. Corners are tough. They demand attention and want to be filled. Rather than a fake plant or flower arrangement, opt for a resilient orchid, says Showers. If the light is adequate, it’ll last longer than some pieces of furniture. Showers also recommends the forgiving Kentia palm, which tolerates lower light levels and infrequent watering.

Still, some people simply don’t want to maintain indoor plants. In those cases, Showers finds other, more creative ways to treat corners. Pedestals offer versatility, because they can hold a hold a sculpture or a flower arrangement, while large metal garden pieces create a casual, bring-the-outdoors-in mood. Finally, decorative screens are Showers’ favorite corner solutions, because so often, they’re not just pieces of furniture but works of art.

Use this: Innovation
Not that: Fur

Years ago, Brad Weesner of Bradweesnerdesign in Frederick, Md., spent some time hunting duck, when he developed the conviction that people should hunt only what they’d use or eat. That extends to interiors. He’s willing to use byproducts of items that are already manufactured or consumed, including leather or down, but he has no interest in products like mink, chinchilla, eel skin or ivory.

Synthetic skins, leathers and furs are as luxurious as the real deal these days, but Weesner is disinclined to use those as well. “Even faux animal prints help propagate the desire to acquire real skins,” he says, “which supports the poaching of animals in Africa and around the world.”

The world is full of infinitely more unusual surface materials, from textiles into which real gold fibers are woven to Swarovski crystal-studded fabrics. In one Washington, D.C., basement, Weesner created a feeling of expansiveness through reflective materials, including a subtly pearlescent ceiling paint. Fine, metallic threads woven into Lee Jofa upholstery provide additional shimmer. “I don’t see anywhere in that room where, say, a white chinchilla throw would have helped it.”

Assuming that it’s ok to market to 11-year-olds as if they were 16-year-olds is shocking to some media and advertising critics who have taken up the battle against marketing to kids.

Marketing efforts playing into tweens’ aspirations to adopt attitudes of much older teens are one alarming development that author Susan Linn sees. “The message they’re getting,” she says, “is that playing with toys and not being interested in the opposite sex is babyish and they ought to be acting out in sexual ways.”

Ms. Linn, associate director of the Media Center at the Harvard-affiliated Judge Baker Children’s Center, sees such efforts as part of a marketing maelstrom surrounding kids that puts normal childhood development at jeopardy. The question of whether marketing to children does them harm isn’t new, nor are efforts to curtail it. In 1978, the Federal Trade Commission earned the moniker “national nanny” by calling for a ban on ads to children under age 7, a proposition Congress overruled.

More than 20 years later, that concern has spread to even the most cutting-edge marketing tactic of “word-ofmouth.” The National Institute on Media & the Family this month called on the Word of Mouth Marketing Association to prohibit the “exploitation” of young people, after the association released a draft of an ethics code. Among the institute’s concerns are word-of-mouth campaigns that take place in Internet chat rooms.

OBESITY PART OF THE DEBATE
With this and other issues like obesity providing fresh fuel for the debate, Ms. Linn is among a new generation of critics taking aim at marketing to kids.

She was one of six psychologists appointed to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Advertising to Children, which is pressing for federal restrictions on all advertising to kids under age 8, citing research that shows these youngsters cannot “recognize persuasive intent.”

Although the political support to enact sweeping restrictions isn’t likely to coalesce soon, the proposal has alarmed some youth-market experts. “How can you possibly ban advertising to the 7-year-old who lives with his 9-year-old brother,” asks Paul Kurnit, president of KidShop, “and tell him he can’t watch ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ with his brother?”

Rising childhood obesity rates have focused attention on food marketers in particular. As health experts raise red flags and define the situation as an epidemic, author Juliet B. Schor questions why “the No. 1 product marketed to kids is junk food.”

Food marketers have increasingly begun to respond. As part of a “balanced lifestyles commitment to children,” McDonald’s Corp. now offers healthy food and beverage choices with its Happy Meals, while Altria Group’s Kraft Foods recently scored PR points by announcing a shift of marketing dollars to its “Better for you” kids label, Sensible Solutions.

Although Ms. Schor, who’s on the faculty of the sociology department at Boston College, commends action along these lines, she says: “Most children’s marketers need to face up to more than they’re facing up to right now.”

CONSUMPTION=COOLNESS?
Too often, she says, children’s advertising equates consumption with coolness, unnecessarily linking children’s identity to products. Marketers would do well to dispense with advertising that sells the “social symbolic value of the product,” says Ms. Schor, in favor of “a more utilitarian message, like ‘this toy is fun’ and ‘this food tastes good.”‘

The counterpoint is that young consumers’ media savvy makes them less susceptible to the wholesale packaging of cool than critics contend. Author Alissa Quart partly agrees with that assessment but adds she found kids’ sophistication “gave them a false sense that they were somehow in charge of consumer culture. At the end of the day, they were hypnotized by overspending.”

As a result, young people are learning the habits of debt accumulation before they understand the value of money, Ms. Quart says. While the responsibility of teaching children this lesson is currently shouldered-or shirked-by parents, Ms. Quart suggests that corporations help families “bear the brunt” by funding school programs that teach money management.

“If we claim to care about children differently in so many areas of life,” she asks, “why don’t we care differently in advertising and marketing to them?”

In fact, marketers say they do. “There already is a commitment within the industry to advertise and market responsibly to kids,” says Julie Halpin, CEO of WPP Group’s Geppetto Group, New York. Ms. Halpin sits on the board of the Children’s Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus. CARU is the ad industry’s selfregulatory watchdog for what it calls the “uniquely impressionable and vulnerable child audience.”

This points to a patch of theoretical com- mon ground on which the two camps might meet, but CARU comes under fire because of its voluntary compliance structure.

“Repeatedly,” Ms. Linn writes, “it’s been government regulation, not self-regulation, that causes industries to curb exploitive practices.”

MOST CHANGES ACCEPTED
In response, Ms. Halpin says that of the 138 ads CARU deemed inconsistent with its guidelines in 2003, 134 were discontinued or modified to adhere to the principles.

“Marketers are parents and concerned citizens, too ,” says Ms. Halpin. “People within this industry generally want to do what’s right, fair and responsible for children.”

In Mr. Kurnit’s view, the critical distinction between marketers and their critics is the negative prism through which the latter see the lives of children: “Many of the critics who would set themselves up as proponents for kids come across as just the opposite. So much of their perception about kids suggests that kids are out of control and life is very difficult for them. Talk to kids, and they won’t tell you that.”