If you live in the States, you probably get something similar: black and white, newspaper-printed, a round-up of state and town government goings-on, library awards, referendums, new restaurants and pizza joints opening up, pet rescues, tag sales, ongoing Appalachian Mountain Club/church groups/AA meetings. And obituaries.

Normally, one of us reads it while the other one makes dinner, but last night we stood side by side at our kitchen island and read about the life of Mrs. Margaret Bickel of Southbury, Connecticut, who died on April 14th at 102 years old. Neither of us knew Mrs. Bickel, but we would have liked to.

Maybe it is a function of age to read the obits, or the fact that I grew up this way: when I was a kid, my father read the New York Times obituaries every morning over breakfast, he said, to make sure he was still alive. Maira Kalman has written and spoken extensively about this practice; it is how she discovered the life of Megan Boyd, eccentric master of fish flies who once turned down an invitation from Queen Elizabeth wanting to present her with the British Empire Medal. Miss Boyd couldn’t leave her home in Golspie, Scotland because, apparently, she didn’t have anyone to watch her dog that day. An extraordinary person who called little attention to herself, Boyd dressed in her daily uniform of a man’s shirt and tie, sweater, wool skirt, tweed sports jacket, and heavy army-style boots. She had no electricity until 1985 and died in 2001, age 86.

Susan and I both come from long-lived family members: her maternal grandmother lived to 101, her mother lived to 94, my paternal aunt lived to 102, and my paternal grandmother lived to 93. We know the stories: Susan’s subsistence farmer grandmother was widowed at a very young age, left with ten children for whom she made clothes and shoes (we use one of her heavy iron shoe forms as a doorstop), and got through her days by taking ten-minute naps on her farmhouse kitchen floor; she was, according to all who knew her, somehow never without a smile. Once my uncle went off to fight the war in Europe, my intrepid aunt and her mother-in-law spent their days in front of a large map spread out on the kitchen table, trying to figure out where he was based on a secret, censor-defying code they devised involving numerical tags: it was, he wrote, 48 days since they’d last seen each other, and he was looking forward to getting home and watching his 11 year old niece grow up. Meaning: coordinates were roughly 48.7904 N latitude, and 11.4979 E longitude. They figured it out; he was in Bavaria.

My father told me these stories, so I don’t know how accurate they are because memories can be like a game of telephone, changing and changing again over the years. Nevertheless, they are stories that I treasure: Susan and I are members of the last generation linking the pre-computer, pre-selfie, Megan-Boyd-fly-tying world where it would take days and sometimes weeks to get a letter, to the Tik Tok/instant gratification universe where digital addiction and oppressive rage at people one doesn’t even know are a built-in component of everyday life.

My aunt and uncle, Susan’s grandmother, Susan’s mother, my father — they’re gone now, and evidence of that generation is disappearing. I have in my office direct reminders of it: the piles of letters that my father sent home from the Pacific, where he flew planes as a nineteen-year-old night fighter pilot in World War 2; a picture of his squadron hangs over my desk; a New York City municipal photo of my mother, grandmother, grandfather, and granduncle outside the Brooklyn furniture store they owned on Grand Street, circa 1938, when my mother was just three years old.

But back to Mrs. Bickel of Southbury, Conncticut. Here is what we learned last night.

SOUTHBURY — Margaret Bickel of Southbury passed away peacefully at home on Sunday, April 14 at the age of 102.

Margaret Schrup was born on May 24, 1921 in Dubuque, Iowa. She was the 3rd of 8 children. Her mother died giving birth to the 8th child.

Margaret was 10 years old at the time, and assumed many adult duties including cooking, cleaning, and ironing her father’s suits and shirts. Margaret’s father, Tony Schrup, owned a Packard auto dealership and Margaret started driving at age 14 and would drive a 12 cylinder Packard to transport her younger brothers and sisters to school.

Tony was also active in Democratic politics and in 1936 drove Franklin Delano Roosevelt around Dubuque during a campaign stop. Tony brought FDR by his home so all his children, including Margaret could meet him.

At eighteen she left home, moving to Minneapolis and learned about bookkeeping and accounting.

She took a job with Remington Rand and learned punch card accounting. During the 1940s, Margaret traveled extensively for Remington Rand helping customer convert from manual accounting to new punch card accounting systems.

She spent a lot of time in the south, in Houston and Albuquerque, and many other locations across the U.S.

In the early 1950s she moved to New York where she continued her career. In 1953 she met John Bickel after being introduced by a mutual friend. John had built a table for the friend and Margaret complimented John on type of joint in the table legs. John was impressed with Margaret’s knowledge of woodworking and joinery and they began dating immediately.

Their first date was a walk across the George Washington Bridge.

They were married 3 weeks later and spent every day together for the next 65 years. Margaret and John lived in Manhattan. They spent weekends in Westchester, deciding in 1954 to buy land there and build their own home.

Both Margaret and John were admirers of Frank Lloyd Wright, and they managed to hire the architect who had overseen Wright’s Usonia project. With his plans in hand, they built their home themselves, while John continued working by day and worked with Margaret building their home in the evenings and weekends.

Margaret loved having children and being a mother. She was a feminist. An ardent advocate for education. She read to Rachel and John before they could read, sharing her love for books. Always curious. A fan of puzzles including the crossword, Soduku and others. Games including chess, rummy, canasta, and hearts.

Margaret and John took great pleasure in sharing their appreciation for all forms of art, architecture, and travel with their children.

Margaret loved to read and read The NY Times every day and The New Yorker every week.

After John retired as a photographer in 1979, he started a second career with Margaret as a fine wood craftsman. Margaret participated by contributing design ideas and ran the business end of things.

She taught herself to use the IBM PC and VisiCalc, Multiplan and Lotus 1-2-3. The two began exhibiting their work at juried craft shows in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, winning several awards and selling furniture. This second career lasted from 1980-2013.

In 2014 John and Margaret sold the home they built in Ossining, N.Y. and relocated to Southbury in Heritage Village. They joined several clubs and made new friends in Southbury. John passed away in 2018.

Margaret is survived by her children, John Bickel, Jr. and his wife Margaret of Southbury, and Rachel Bickel of Brattleboro, Vt.

The family would like to thank her caregiver Kuhle Madlingozi for the wonderful care and compassion given to our mom in her final days.

There will not be a service.

Rest in peace, Margaret.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.

Image courtesy of the author.

That’s another of those characteristics that we’re hesitant to acknowledge. After all, look at the definition:

Webster’s primarily defines the word in two ways:

a) a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation;

b) an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition.

The secondary definition:

a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary.

Let’s see…”ignorance,” “fear of the unknown,” “trust in magic,” “irrational attitude toward the supernatural,” ideas “maintained despite evidence to the contrary.” Those are mostly not qualities we want applied to ourselves!

It’s pretty hard for us modern people to agree that we use this framework to make sense of the world. So, most of us say, “nah…not really…I’m not superstitious.”

At least, that’s what our Rider says. Remember, The Rider is a metaphorical way of describing our conscious experience of ourselves as decision-makers, as agents who are rationally in control of our lives. Beliefs in magic or making decisions despite contrary evidence is not The Rider’s way. The Rider is the agent I call “I” or “me.” The Rider uses logic. Thinking.

Ah, but then there’s The Elephant. The Elephant is that powerful aspect of our minds that unconsciously makes decisions and enables actions “without thinking about it.” The Elephant reacts to the world instinctively in order to stay safe and solve problems in the most efficient way possible. Logic takes way more time and energy than The Elephant wants to allocate. The Elephant uses intuition. Feeling.

Over evolutionary timescales, our species has developed little bundles of intuitive problem-solving algorithms that we’ve passed along across generations. How did we, for example, come to associate breaking a mirror with seven years of bad luck? As is so often the case, this one has origins in Greek and Roman culture. For the Greeks, a human soul was revealed through the person’s reflection in water or on a shiny metal object. The soul was out there, vulnerable, in the reflection. Glass mirrors were created in around 300 CE and the Romans determined that bad luck would befall anyone who broke one. But, not forever. The Romans believed the body renewed itself every seven years (a pretty modern way of thinking about cell replacement!) so that the original body of the mirror-breaker would be entirely switched out in that time period. Hence, seven years bad luck per broken mirror!

Of course there are hundreds of these superstitions in every culture. It seems we can’t help but provide ways of foretelling and controlling the future. We’ve connected good or bad fortune with animals (black cat cross your path?, carry a rabbit’s foot?), numbers (13 and 17 are particularly bad!), objects (indoor open umbrellas, horseshoes!), or actions (walking under ladders). Every culture has its own “supernatural” ways to explain the good or bad things that happen to people.

No matter how hard we might try, it’ would be practically impossible for us to completely rid ourselves of some vestiges of these superstitions.

And, why should we?

Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? What’s wrong with wearing your lucky sweater on a job interview? Most of the time our Elephant’s inherent superstitiousness is harmless. Just go with it!

And, EVEN THOUGH I KNOW THAT WHAT I SAY HAS NO AFFECT ON THE OUTCOME, I’m absolutely not going to say anything about the Pittsburgh Steelers making the NFL playoffs this year!

But, if I should slip, I’ll be sure not to tempt fate by immediately knocking on wood!

Tom Guarriello is a psychologist, consultant, and founding faculty member of the Masters in Branding program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He’s spent over a decade teaching psychology-based courses like The Meaning of Branded Objects, as well as leading Honors and Thesis projects. He’s spearheaded two podcasts, BrandBox and RoboPsych, the accompanying podcast for his eponymous website on the psychology of human-robot interaction. This essay was originally posted on Guarriello’s Substack, My Favorite Things.

Header photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash.

I am a creative director with dyslexia.

In the past, seemingly mundane tasks like sending an email presented a challenge, draining time and mental energy. I would often spend upwards of an hour dictating, reading, re-reading, and asking a colleague to proofread before finally hitting send. Now, with a simple prompt in ChatGPT, my thoughts are magically transformed into clear, concise words. What once took precious time can be accomplished with a click, freeing up my brain to focus on what it does best: bringing ideas and strategies to life that help my clients stay ahead of the curve. 

This is just one example of AI leveling the playing field, enabling nonlinear thinkers like me to communicate as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Yet, for design and creative firms and professionals, AI presents an even more profound opportunity: the cognitive abilities inherent in dyslexia, like the knack for brainstorming endlessly, tackling problems from various perspectives, and manipulating objects in the mind’s eye, uniquely equip us to stretch the boundaries of generative design tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and DeepArt.

This is a game-changer. AI not only eliminates the logistical and communication barriers that have sometimes hindered the success of neurodiverse individuals in the workplace but also empowers people with dyslexia to leverage their inherent strengths and supercharge their creativity.

Case in point: You can present me—and most dyslexics I know—with nearly any business challenge, and we can riff on it and problem-solve for hours. We leverage each other’s ideas as springboards, challenge thoughts, and flesh solutions out collaboratively. Our capacity to dissect problems from multiple angles, akin to turning a simple problem over as if it were a tesseract, distinguishes us.

This same way of thinking lets me really push the limits of AI design tools. I thrive on playing around with art directions, constantly tweaking and refining them to bring ideas to life. For dyslexics, whose minds are often in overdrive, it’s like always having a tireless collaborator by your side, especially when working against tight deadlines. AI steps in when my dyslexic brain might be racing, helping me translate mental images into designs more quickly. By guiding the AI—use this relief, try this mode—I can accelerate the creative process and ensure concepts materialize closer to how my mind envisioned them.

And isn’t that just what every agency is after? In a world where ChatGPT can dish out answers faster than you can say “Google it,” intelligence means much more than just knowing stuff. In our industry, successful strategies and campaigns are ultimately about imagination – something AI will never be able to master. AI doesn’t stand for Artificial Imagination because that comes from the human brain, which is irreplicable. And you can’t teach an AI to think like a dyslexic even if you tried. The magic of dyslexic thinking lies in its ability to break free from the norm and see things in a totally fresh light.

A great strategy or campaign is all about asking the right questions to solve problems and challenges. You have to know what you need to achieve and then dig deep. Those who use AI in simplistic and basic ways risk regurgitating outdated ideas and strategies. After all, AI is programmed to be predictable and reliable. But the magic of human creativity lies in the ways that the brain thinks unpredictably – the instances when it fails to give the same old tired answer to the same old tired question. And that’s what dyslexics are really good at. 

So what should agencies do to capitalize on this moment? 

First and foremost, companies must fully embrace neurodiversity as a valuable asset in the workplace rather than viewing it as a limitation. Sir Richard Branson and the nonprofit Made by Dyslexia have championed this idea by collaborating with LinkedIn to enable people with dyslexia to showcase “Dyslexic Thinking” as a skill on their profiles. Branson himself has added this skill to his LinkedIn profile, and I have done the same. However, a 2020 report from U.K. employers revealed that 50% of HR managers admitted they would not consider hiring neurodivergent candidates. If you look at the top of every field, there is a dyslexic who threw out the rule book. Think: Steven Spielberg, Barbara Corcoran, and Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad. Businesses that fail to recognize this opportunity risk losing valuable talent to more forward-thinking companies.

Companies should also ensure that neurodiverse employees can access essential tools such as ChatGPT, Grammarly, Co.Writer, and VoiceDreamReader that help them communicate and work efficiently.

Lastly, they should offer thorough training on all AI tools, and consider forming specialized teams of neurodivergent employees dedicated to experimentation and innovation. These teams can craft instructions, best practices, and workflows to unleash the full creative power of AI tools.

When I was ten, I became a professional magician, which became my creative refuge — a sanctuary away from the confines of the classroom where, as a dyslexic, I often felt out of place. It’s one of the reasons I like to say there is a little bit of magic in dyslexia. Now, with the rise of generative AI, I’m more convinced of this than ever. When AI is harnessed to its fullest extent and paired with the unique strengths of dyslexics — strong problem-solving skills, unconventional thinking, and a knack for tackling challenges from many perspectives — the potential for magic and unbridled creativity becomes boundless. 

Images created by the author.

Hello, hello. So the big news: I managed to escape to London for a day. Have to go down and refill the tanks every now and then. Thanks to some very intense and regimented planning, I managed to fit in a lot of art: the recently made-over National Portrait Gallery; the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize at the Photographers’ Gallery; the World Photography Awards at Somerset House; and Richard Serra’s six large drawings at David Zwirner. But the highlight of the day was this errant cardboard box that slowly and flamboyantly drifted down James Street to the delight of everyone.

In between all that frolicking about, I did manage to grab something to eat at the fantastic Lina Stores on Greek Street – sat next to Ruth Bloody Wilson. I was very cool about this, of course. I pushed the boundaries of nonchalance so far I think she actually ended up being starstruck by me.

Back in the real world of the internet, I got a little bit lost in the Rural Indexing Project, photographically documenting the architecture of America. Fascinating to see the buildings grouped by tags – I had no idea there were a number of uniform Post Office designs, for example.

Only a few days left for Unit Editions/Volume’s Anita Klinz monograph Seeking Beauty to hit its funding target. It looks absolutely lovely, but at fifty quid a pop, I can see why it might be some way off. I would imagine students/young designers are a huge section of the target readership for this sort of book, and that price tag is a heck of a barrier, but it now seems like the norm. There’s definitely a market for smaller, simpler design books at a lower price point.

I’ve finally switched to Chrome, and a big thank you to Alex for recommending the Control Panel for Twitter extension. It’s basically resets the design and usability back ten years – which is of course a very good thing.

… and then I immediately went a bit viral with a dumb bit of photoshopping. Kind of tangentially related: “Planet of the Apes” Goes to a ’70s Mall, an excellent find from the LIFE archive.

Hanging Stones, a five hour circular walk of abandoned buildings in the North York Moors, all housing Andy Goldsworthy artworks. Yes please.

Elsewhere across the newslettiverse: Animation Obsessive on how Ghost in the Shell was deliberately engineered for western audiences; Owen D. Pomery examines a particularly fine Tintin spread; Nick Asbury launched his new book The Road to Hell.

And finally a quick affiliate plug for Freeagent, without which my business would pretty much collapse into a void of unutterable fiscal despair. With this here link you get a 30-day free trial plus 10% off your subscription, which is nice.

That is all.

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header photo courtesy the author.

We speak with Ryan Larcom, a Director at High Alpha Innovation, a venture building studio, to learn about his business design approach to launching scalable startups. You can watch the full video of our conversation or read an edited/condensed transcript of our conversation below.

Sam Aquillano: We’ve got a great guest this week. We have someone who’s using business design to nurture and grow new startup ventures that connect deeply with user needs so that they can achieve scale, sometimes massive scale. We’re joined by Ryan Larcom from High Alpha Innovation. Ryan loves turning bold ideas into reality.

I’m told his superpower is complexity busting — he’s guiding leaders to make sense of business and industry complexities in order to gain confidence and execute. As a director at High Alpha Innovation, Brian partners with corporations and universities and build partnerships to co-design and structure investments in new venture-backable startups to unlock amazing innovation.

We’re gonna hear all about it. The common thread of Ryan’s career has been a desire to make the world a better place through thoughtfully designed business models, products and experiences. Like me, Ryan attended Rochester Institute of Technology for industrial design. He also majored in mechanical engineering. So I’m super excited to hear how he went from designing and making physical things to designing businesses. So welcome Ryan, thanks so much for being here.

Ryan Larcom: Awesome, great to be here, Sam.

SA: First off, set the stage for us, tell us about High Alpha Innovation and what you all do.

RL: High Alpha Innovation partners with large organizations that could be corporations, universities, even municipalities to help them innovate, specifically by launching startups. We believe that startups are really efficient learning engines, and when you’re trying to enter a new space, access a new market, create a new technology, they’re actually the most efficient way to go about doing those things. So we help them innovate by launching new startups.

SA: Why is that the most efficient approach?

RL: Big companies are really efficient at their core business model. In fact, that’s what they’ve gotten good at over years upon years upon years. They were learning engines once as well. They figured out how do you create a product. How do you bring it to market? And how do you deliver that product really efficiently and effectively? And so they’ve built a ton of knowledge around that. They’ve trained employees to be able to deploy that core strategy. The problem is that when you need to work outside of that core strategy into an adjacency of some sort or another, you’re outside of your common knowledge area. And those processes that make you great at executing on the core actually restrict you from learning in those new areas. And so that’s why we think startups are really, really good to attack that opportunity.

SA: Yeah, drop a little startup in a massive enterprise and watch the magic happen. So would you consider High Alpha Innovation an incubator? right? When I was growing my startup, we were part of an incubator/accelerator that gave us space, a little bit of money, certainly a ton of mentorship. And it was about sort of like getting us through some of the early stage blocks.

RL: We classify ourselves as a venture builder, a brand new category. You think about accelerators being a time-bound cohort of people who have existing businesses that are trying to get access to customers and investors. The venture studio was the next logical kind of movement — a venture builder takes all of the core processes and knowledge and turns them loose in the context of someone else’s business model, so in our case, corporations and universities.

SA: In so many of those parts of your career, you were doing business design. Maybe we didn’t call it business design then, but we’re definitely calling it now. So how do you define business design today?

RL: Yeah, it’s a hard word because I think it’s still an emerging one in many ways. You think about industrial design, which usually speaks about the creation of a product. When we think about business design, I think about it as the creation of a business, so design is a series of intentional choices, and there’s a whole capability set that we’ve built around that — usually in the context of products or collateral or assets, like, like graphic designer, industrial design.

On the business side, I think about a business model having three parts, feasibility, desirability, viability, or how you create, capture, and deliver value. Visual design typically focuses on just the creation of value. On the value proposition itself. Business design incorporates the revenue model and the resourcing of how you actually deploy that in the context of a profitable entity.

SA: Yes, and you can design towards those choices — that makes sense. I get this question lot so I want to ask you given your role: is there a difference between entrepreneurship and business design?

RL: That’s a really good question. I’ve never thought about it that way before. I think that entrepreneurs practice business design in some ways, right? Because as I said, startups are learning engines, and so you’re constantly learning what is your business model along the way. But there’s usually about three big movements I think about from entrepreneurship: you’re de-risking the tech, you’re de-risking the business model, and then you’re scaling the business. And so it’s that middle one where I tend to focus on business design, which is turning assumptions and knowledge around those three pieces of feasibility, viability, desirability, which usually exists, at least in venture backed startups, between zero and series A or B. Once you start scaling the business, technically you’re still designing it, but really all you’re doing is creating a growth engine that powers a business model that’s already been designed.

SA: Let’s pretend I’m a founder of a startup. How is that process happening from idea to partnership with large organizations?

RL: We’re partnering with organizations who want to innovate, and so what we’re first trying to figure out is the theme. Where do we want to focus this opportunity? Is it far enough adjacent that the core won’t accidentally suck it back in? And then is there enough space that you can innovate there and really differentiate from what exists in the market?

From there, we get from kind of macro, really tactical. We all grew up on jobs be done methodology, of which I’m still a huge fan — what we want to understand is for a given customer, for a given persona what are their unmet and priority jobs to be done. So we spend a lot of time trying to understand the functional, social, and emotional needs of users in specific circumstances, and then prioritize them based on which ones are valuable and important, unmet, and widely held, so that we can understand jobs that are yet to be satisfied in the world. And so that becomes the core of our business model. We spend the first six weeks just doing that before we more forward on anything. I think the world in general is really bad at framing problems and really great at solving them. We need to make sure we frame the right problem to solve.

SA: I would say that’s the foundation to build from, right? Because then from there, it’s more of like, what’s our unique value proposition? How are we making money? How are we delivering? Do you use the same sort of iterative discovery approach to those elements as well?

RL: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s a hypothesis when we ship it right out of the gate. And what we want to do is figure out what are the critical assumptions that sit underneath the hypothesis that this customer has an unsatisfied job to be done. And the danger is everybody tests the hypotheses that they know how to test best first, instead of the ones that are most critical, right? I’m a designer. I start sketching stuff on paper. My dad’s a CFO. He starts going to Excel to write the revenue model. My friends are engineers. They start figuring out if you can make this thing. But the problem is if you don’t do them in the right order you end up spending a lot of time where it doesn’t matter.

Really great example of this: one of our friends consulted with a large airline company that was trying to commercialize the Osprey, the vertical takeoff aircraft. The big idea was wouldn’t it be neat if we demilitarized this, you could now ship large numbers of civilians right from heliports right out. And so they spent millions of dollars on architects to design the experience of going to a heliport. They did the interior design to figure out how many people would fit in this thing.

And it was at this point that this individual came in with a consulting company and started looking at it and was like, have you guys talked to any pilots? And it turns out no commercial pilot wants to fly the Osprey because it was made for military pilots in military settings. It’s a dog to fly, it’s rough.

And so as a result, the consumer experience is terrible too. It’s loud and you couldn’t put enough noise isolation into this thing to make a good consumer experience. And so as a result, two key pieces of the value proposition on the revenue model just totally broke. And so we try to go through really rigorously and figure out what can we test and then what’s the lowest fidelity way that we could go about testing those, right? Before you put fingers to keyboard, we’re mocking up product in Figma. Before we mock up product in Figma, we’re hand sketching storyboards. Before hand sketching storyboards, we’re describing it with customers. And you want to just make sure that you’re testing and iterating and every step along the way.

SA: To clarify, are you then literally building a startup from scratch, then recruiting individuals that will then carry that forward? Or are you recruiting folks from inside the partner organization?

RL: Great question. This is where business design becomes venture building in my mind. So business design is shipping the final pitch deck that looks investable that says these are the series of intentional choices that we believe makes for a profitable, venture-backable, scalable business that ought to exist in the world.

Venture building then is snapping together all the other functions to make that work. We’ve got a recruiting team who finds world-class founders who want to found this. We’ve got a finance team who figures out how to turn this revenue model into a set of assumptions they can execute against. Legal folks who can figure out a cap table structure that makes this investable from a corporate partner and a venture perspective and so on. There’s lots of functions to make a functioning business.

And so yes, in our case, we usually go out and find great entrepreneurs from the world. And our specific thesis is that we’re launching these companies alongside often large corporations. And so if you’re going to be in relationship with your first company as big enterprise and first investor, you need an experienced entrepreneur who has been through that multiple times to be able to navigate some of those difficulties. It’s a huge lever and also a huge stick. And you want to make sure that you’ve got experienced folks.

What we want to do ultimately is to de-risk the business to the point that we can attract world-class entrepreneurs. Clearly, there’s a lot of work to get to that point, but the business is going to continue learning. That’s not an inflection point when you hire someone that continues to learn all the way through Series A plus. And so what we want to do is attract world-class founders. So problem number one is how do you get world-class founders to co-found businesses alongside you? And then how do you do it at scale?

SA: How do you break assumptions and build confidence when designing a business?

RL: I think first is it’s an iterative process. You’re coming down the funnel. And so part of confidence building is talking to hundreds of potential folks at the top of the funnel, seeing some of those come back again, who said, I have a problem.

And then we articulated back to them and they say, yes, that’s the correct articulation of that problem. And then another set coming back and us saying, what if we solved it this way? And then saying, yes, that’s the type of solution, the value props we’d want to see. And then us coming back with a product and saying, what if it looked like this? And then saying, yes. And then us coming back with a business model and saying, what if we priced it and packaged it like that? So you just bring folks down the funnel. And then your assets, of course, get more and more high fidelity along the way. What starts out as hand sketches ends up in in beautiful product walkthroughs and mockups and things that you can run user tests on. So I think it’s a lot about just the incremental moving from one end to the other. But I think there are a couple of really key inflection points where we look for traction, right? Not just that people say, yes, that’s really nice all the way down, but that someone’s willing to write a check. That really matters. That an entrepreneur who says, that’s a really neat idea is saying, I’ll leave my job and start this.

SA: Can you share a real case study?

RL: One of our first portfolio companies ended up being one of the early success stories that I just love to tell. We started work with Koch Industries. Koch’s got a portfolio of companies, including Georgia Pacific. We worked with one called Molex, they’re electronic suppliers. And they were having a hard time understanding which of their electronics components were most likely to be late and shut down their factory as a result of the lags of lead time. Now, this was just pre-pandemic. And when the pandemic took off, of course this became even more imminent.

We ended up shaking out a company called Amplio that initially went about identifying those risks so that instead of looking at hundreds of potential parts that could go wrong, procurement leaders could look at the nine that mattered that week and spend their time really efficiently and effectively making sure that they had been dual sourced or expedited or something like that. We were really lucky to get an employee from the Koch portfolio to run this. He was running a corner of Georgia Pacific supply chain and had been in startups before. We paired him with a chief data scientist from a supply chain startup — so he understood the venture space. This became this like perfect little combo that we just dropped in and said start building product.

They created value in 30 days. They were able to find things that procurement officers couldn’t get to in months and months. What’s funny though, for all the success — yay, business design — they hit their biggest pivot right after they launched. They realized that the more electronic suppliers that they got online the more interchangeable those parts were. And so, yes, Molex could expedite a part on a 747 from China, but it turns out that one of their other clients had an electronic supplier just across on the other side of Guadalajara that was producing interchangeable electronics components. And so they effectively became a marketplace. They could tell better where parts were and create interchangeability for these suppliers so that you were saving massive amounts of time and money.

Instead of trying to solve this on an Excel spreadsheet, they were solving it in the context of a marketplace. So huge pivot. That hit right before the hype cycle of VC ended on the far side of 2021, right at the peak of the pandemic. So they raised a massive round of seed funding from some leading venture capitalists that have just set them up for some really early success and continue to go about solving the problem that they were set in place to solve.

SA: I saw like you also work with like academic institutions?

RL: We had a university endowment come to us and say something to the effect of, university endowments are asset managers, right? They are exposed to VC, they invest and they want returns and they want early stage exposure as well to diversify their risk profile. They’re also being pulled by their university is to invest in student and professor intellectual property. That’s really hard to do for a number of reasons. One is it’s super lumpy. You could have a ton of IP disclosure or nothing in a year. Most of it’s not venture-backable. And then a lot of it from a returns perspective are disincentivized from the university model. Meaning universities are great at commercializing devices and molecules, really poor at commercializing software because the skill sets are utterly different. And so the opportunity that they spotted that we’ve now jumped into is if we were to focus on partnering with students and professors at the idea stage rather than at the solution stage, We could avoid the solutions-in-search-of-problems problem, create brand new startups and commercialize them in ways that enable endowments to invest because they’re venture-backable. They have a great entrepreneurial talent in at early stages, but they stay aligned to the mission of the university. We literally are creating the proprietary deal flow that every VC says that they have. We’re building startups on campus. That’s it.

We just launched a fund with Notre Dame, which we’re really proud to announce, of $18 million. The fund is focused on the Catholic social teachings that underpin Notre Dame’s strategy and we’re already kind of digging into our first sprint which will focus on breaking the cycles of poverty. So while you have to be relatively humble, there’s only so many ways that software startups can act there, there are still a ton of low-hanging opportunities that we think that we can make an impact and make for-profit businesses out of that serve all the different actors.

SA: How do you apply business design to the business of high alpha innovation?

RL: We try and dog food as much as we can on our own process, but it’s really hard. I’ll tell you, I have gained a ton of empathy for entrepreneurs. I’ve been startup adjacent in venture capital before, but we ourselves are a startup.

High Alpha Innovation grows through revenue and aligned with our partners in that. We actually just had an offsite recently. Our portfolio management team focuses with founders day one on identifying what their revenue formula is for their business, which is really, really neat. So a revenue formula might look something like price times gross margin equals dollars, and then dollars minus headcount costs equals profit, right? That’s a very basic revenue formula,

When you get the formula correct, though, you can realize what the key levers of growing a business are along the way. And so we just dove in and defined our own revenue formula for our business that helps us to understand: how do we price and package? When you kind of put together the whole formula, you’re like, oh, those are the five levers I ought to be, acting on in my business. What experiments should we put underneath those levers that we can continue to go about unlocking new growth opportunities from?

SA: What tools and frameworks are you using? And then what artifacts are you actually generating beyond the classic slide deck?

RL: The process I want to talk about actually is Sprint Week. One of the things we realized is that all businesses have momentum inside of them that needs to be broken with forcing functions. So funny enough a fund has to start 12 businesses in three years. And yet after we launched business number one, it was easier to support the operations of business one than it was to start business two. And we said, shoot, we need a forcing function. Otherwise we’re never going to yield for our investors what we want to do. And so Sprint Week was born out of that and it has continued to iterate for the last almost decade since then. For us Sprint Week is about taking a really well framed problem and then designing the product and then business model that go around that.

It’s a three day intensive that we kind of deep dive into. And then on the fourth day, we pitch these decks with the idea that on the fifth day, we’re actually deciding which of these businesses that we’ve pitched goes forward. And success is multifold, right? Getting to the far side of Sprint Week and saying, this is an investible concept is success.

The assets that come out of Sprint Week look very, very much like you’d expect in just about any pre-seed pitch deck. We’re looking for a really good understanding of who our customer is. We’ve spoken to, at that point, dozens of folks inside of our ideal customer profile. So there’s something that looks like a persona. We have a really good understanding of what the job to be done is and why that is a priority to them. That usually gets told in a really compelling story that includes kind of a why now for that problem. Why is this moment the moment that customer jobs have become reprioritized in some way or another. What’s the secret by which this business knows something else about the world that other people have overlooked? Then we end up in a product. We really, really like to tell the future state in visuals. I think folks tend to underestimate the power of visual design as well inside large organizations.

We show the product, we show the faces of the people using the product, and we step through click by click, not as the full movie, but as the sizzler rail for the movie, if that makes sense, illustrating the key value props along the way. And then we talk about the economic model.

We have this kind of quirky thing that we call the nautilus, which, if you think about the way the shell expands on itself, we’re asking ourselves questions of how does this business get to 100K in recurring revenue, a million, 10 million, and a hundred million dollars. And some people call that a reverse P&L. But what it forces you to say is, okay, if I have 100K with only two customers, that’s 50K a customer. Great. Who are those two customers? Back to personas. How do we access them? Who buys? How efficient is that going to be? And then 50k, wow, that’s a lot of money in recurring revenue for a product, right? How long will the sales cycle be on that? What does the quality of the product need to do in order to yield 50k in recurring revenue? And so that sets your product roadmap. And then, of course, your product roadmap sets your team capabilities. And then your team capabilities set your investment needs. And so even basic crayon math like that, it’s so funny. You can get so many design decisions.

SA: What’s your advice for people designing businesses, either internally, as we’re talking, within a big organization, or your classic entrepreneur — what would you share to keep them going and to be successful?

RL: Different words of advice probably for different people. So for entrepreneurs, I think the number one thing is, be in market and learn. Build in public, learn alongside customers. It’s totally critical to ship before you’re ready and test your hypotheses, especially the hypotheses that you’re most scared of. And what that requires is forcing functions, that you stop working in the business and start working on the business at a regular pace, which I say with a high degree of empathy, right? Being in a startup ourselves, it is hard.

And then, I think that the idea of these business design skills of product management, of human-centered design are still very radical inside big corporations And I spent a lot of my time inside big Co’s with folks who are not used to emergent strategy. They’re used to deliberate strategy. We’re going here, we’re gonna get there from here to there. And in most of these spaces, we actually don’t know what we don’t know. And deploying tools like this really, really effectively allows you to ship case studies of success in really, really small ways that gets you the permission to be able to go do bigger things.

You’re not walking into the CFO and saying, I need 2 million bucks. You are saying to your direct boss, I need 20K to launch these three experiments. And then I’m back on the other side with data of what we do next as a result.

SA: Thank you so much for being here, Ryan — I loved this conversation. For more info about High Alpha Innovation and their business design work, visit highalphainno.com.

Sam Aquillano is an entrepreneur, design leader, writer, and founder of Design Museum Everywhere. This post was originally published in Sam’s twice-monthly newsletter for the creative-business-curious, Business Design School. Check out Sam’s book, Adventures in Disruption: How to Start, Survive, and Succeed as a Creative Entrepreneur.

Header photo: Unsplash+ in collaboration with Pramod Tiwari.

The two are not the same.

Reality just is.

Your reality is how you see things. How you bend them to your vision.

Reality might be that your company is not growing.

Your reality is that you have an incredible vision to turn this company around and get it to thrive.

If you stay in this reality — the reality of your vision — you become impervious to what Shakespeare called “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

In your reality, you can deal with losing talent, because you are going to bring in folks who are better.

In your reality, you can deal with a terrible meeting because you are in the process of fixing things.

In your reality you can deal with modest revenue, because you know very soon, you will win a big piece of business. And run it efficiently.

Does this sound like some kind of business delusion?

It is. And I call it the Reality Distortion Bubble.

When I coach people, I often ask them to develop one.

Because reality just might sink your ship. But a Reality Distortion Bubble will help you float.

I first heard about Reality Distortion from Steve Jobs.

A colleague of his at Apple referred to Steve’s ability to convince anyone to do anything as his “Reality Distortion Field” (RDF). The RDF describes Jobs’ ability to motivate his team to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks through a mix of charm, persistence, and an unwavering belief that they could make the improbable happen.

One of the anecdotes of Steve’s RDF happened during he original development of the Macintosh. The reality was that the Mac’s software development would take years. Steve demanded that it be done in 10 months.

Impossible? That’s just an opinion. Not Reality Distortion reality.

And sure enough, the Mac team got the Mac ready in months. Not years.

There are plenty of Apple stories like this that prove the point.

Steve had a field. A way he saw things.

I am offering you a bubble. It’s a way to see things in a more positive light. And it’s a way to protect you from the inevitable negative forces. They simply bounce off the bubble.

To round out the bubble, Carl Jung, the scientific force and legendary founder of analytical psychology wrote: “We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it.”

You see, there’s reality. And there’s your reality.

Create a Reality Distortion Bubble for yourself.

Step inside.

You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve.

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Photo by Kind and Curious on Unsplash.

Many people who work for nonprofits view branding as a limiting force, a set of guidelines or a box that their communications team uses to keep everything consistent, but somehow restrictive. There’s also a perception that focusing on branding means prioritizing style over substance, detracting from the altruistic mission that forms the heart of any nonprofit and diverting time and money away from on-the-ground work toward what feels like a “nice to have” initiative.

But this perspective throws out the baby with the bathwater — it ignores the important benefits of branding. The reality is that effective branding is crucial for the success of any organization, including nonprofits. Whether you have a new vision of how philanthropy can be more equitable, or a novel approach for how community safety should be defined and measured, you’re always selling something to someone and wooing them to agree with your perspective so you can build the support you need to advance your mission. In order to demonstrate the value you provide — and for people to believe you — you need to be trusted. That is your brand’s job.

Taylor Swift said it best: “We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them that they have chosen to show us. There will be no further explanation. There will be just reputation.”

For your team to understand and appreciate its power, it might be helpful to reframe the concept of branding as the management and cultivation of your organization’s reputation.

Branding as Reputation Management

At its core, a brand is not just a logo, tagline, or color scheme; those things are all important in generating a positive first impression and helping people remember your brand, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond that, your brand unlocks what people think and feel when they hear your organization’s name. It’s about the emotions and associations that come to mind, which are cultivated over time through consistent, positive experiences and interactions. This is why it’s more fitting to think of branding in terms of reputation.

Your nonprofit’s reputation (AKA, brand) encompasses everything it stands for: its values, its impact on the community, and the trust it builds with supporters, donors, and the public.

Why Reputation Matters

In the nonprofit sector, where resources are often limited and the competition for attention and funding is high, a strong reputation is a gamechanger. It can open doors to new partnerships, expand your donor base, and increase your organization’s influence. When people trust and believe in your cause, they’re more likely to support it with their time, resources, and advocacy.

Consider this: When faced with a decision to donate, volunteers and donors are more likely to choose an organization they’ve heard positive things about, one that has made a real difference in their community or the world. This is where the power of a well-managed brand comes into play. By effectively communicating your mission, values, and successes, you can forge stronger connections with your audience, making them more likely to support your cause.

Overcoming Branding Skepticism

It’s fair to say that the skepticism toward branding in the nonprofit sector is not unfounded. Many fear that too much focus on branding might lead an organization to prioritize image over impact or make it look too fancy. To overcome these fears, it’s crucial to present branding as a tool for better storytelling and engagement, not merely as a marketing strategy. The power of a good, authentic story is undeniable — and it’s something everyone can relate to. When nonprofits showcase real stories of change and impact that allow audiences to connect emotionally with their work, they are brand-building.

Impact doesn’t come at the expense of image. It’s not a zero-sum game.

Your image is a vehicle for sharing and bolstering your impact so your brand can strengthen your reputation and enable further work.

How to Frame Branding for Your Team

If your team has a negative association with branding, that’s not going to magically change overnight. To get your team on board with the idea of branding as a reputation management asset, you’re going to need to help them get there. This might require internal communication, workshops, and training sessions to help staff understand the role of branding in their day-to-day work, from fundraising to program delivery, and how it can enhance their efforts rather than restrict them. You can use these opportunities to show examples of how a strong brand has helped similar organizations achieve their goals, increase their reach, and make a more significant impact — always highlighting the power that comes from effective alignment between the brand and the organization’s core values and mission.

Building a Strong Brand

So, how can a nonprofit build a strong brand or improve its reputation? It starts with clear, consistent messaging that articulates the organization’s mission, vision, and values. This messaging should be evident in all communications, from the website and social media to fundraising appeals and reports. Transparency and authenticity play critical roles; people want to see the real stories behind the work you do, the challenges you face, the ideas and processes that guide your decision-making, and the impacts you make.

Crafting a confident and compelling visual identity is crucial in echoing your brand’s core idea across all touchpoints. This goes beyond just a memorable logo to encompass a cohesive visual language and design system that speaks to your audience — colors, typography, imagery, and design elements that resonate with your mission and values. When these visual elements are deeply rooted in your brand’s essence, they evoke the right emotions and connections in your audience’s hearts and minds and become a shorthand for everything your organization stands for.

Engagement with your people is another important aspect of building a strong brand that lasts — you always want to be learning about how your brand can better support your organization’s strategic goals throughout the lifecycle of your brand. Interact with your supporters, donors, and the broader community on an ongoing basis through various channels. Listen to their feedback and involve them in your journey. Celebrate successes together and be honest about setbacks, showing what you’re learning and how you’re growing.

Your Brand is What You Make of It

Your people might never feel fully at ease with the word ‘branding’ — that’s fine. Reputation is a much harder word to argue with because everyone can appreciate its value as a currency, so go with that.

It’s not about adopting corporate strategies wholesale or focusing on surface-level aesthetics. Instead, it’s about deeply integrating your organization’s values and mission into everything you do and communicate. By doing so, you not only enhance your reputation but also strengthen the relationships that are vital to your success.

In the nonprofit sector, where the ultimate goal is to make a positive change, a strong, well-managed reputation is one of your most valuable assets. At the end of the day, you don’t just want your organization to be known; you want it to be known for making a difference. That’s your brand’s job. Take control of it, or someone else will.

Looking for ways to get your team on board with the value of branding? Having them engage with some fundamental questions about your own brand with our free Nonprofit Brand Score tool might be a good place to start.

This essay is by Deroy Peraza, Partner at Hyperakt, a purpose-driven design and innovation studio that elevates human dignity and ignites curiosity. Originally posted in their newsletter, Insights by Hyperakt.

Illustration by Merit Myers.

My nieces had baby girls weeks apart two years ago. They are now expecting again (due this summer). One of them asked me to design an artwork with letters because her daughter was learning them. 

She had me at letters. The question was what to do: a poster, a set of cards, a book? If a book, what size, what colors, and how? Agonizing over the style of the letters ensued. I started pinning on a board examples of letters that looked like designs for children and another board to pin children’s books. Still, I felt lost for a couple of weeks. 

I started to research children’s books, went to the library, and started to read a bit about children, especially about two-year-olds. Then, I remembered some geometry and reading lessons from Wheaton Montessori School when we lived in Chicago. There are many similarities between design education and the Montessori method, but that is for another post. A particular aspect from my kid’s days at Montessori has always stuck with me: I remember my son tracing shapes with his index finger. He’d do this with words and objects he’d see. That memory helped me decide what to do next. 

The letters needed to be thick enough for a two-year-old to trace with their finger. This is not unlike some of the letters I have written in my daily practice. I thought I would add a simple graphic of an object—food or otherwise— that started with that letter. I also wanted the book to be small enough to fit in the hands of a two-year-old. Thankfully, Blurb offered a 5” x 5” book in softcover at a very reasonable price. Then, I got to work.

Looking back, I could have been more consistent in the type of letters I created. Same with the style of the objects. I also realized that designing for children was more intimidating than designing for adults. There are a plethora of questions floating around. For instance, is this stroke thick enough? Should the O be more like an oval or a circle? How much information is too much or too little? Ultimately, I decided to go through with it all and make edits later. One of my niece’s birthdays has passed, and the other is coming up. Deadlines always work, don’t they? 

The book has been uploaded to Blurb; however, it is not yet listed in their bookstore. Here is the link if you are interested in getting one.

Some photos of the project are below:

Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This is an edited version of an original post on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.

All images © Alma Hoffmann.

It was a very simple problem: I’d gotten a new phone a week or so ago, and during the information transfer, it killed my authenticator app, so I downloaded a new one and tried to link it to my Substack account, but I couldn’t sign into my Substack account because I didn’t have the original authenticator (which had been deleted) and couldn’t get a new Substack QR code for a new authenticator app because….I couldn’t log in. Because I didn’t have the authenticator codes. Because I couldn’t log in. Because I didn’t have the authenticator codes.

After hour seven, I found myself online with SUPPORT, which is an AI chatbot that kept trying to help me by asking me to log in. But I couldn’t log in. Because: no authenticator codes. And no way of getting them.

Okay Elissa, we can fix that! the chatbot said, and brought me back to the original chat screen telling me to log in. Which I couldn’t do because, no authenticator codes.

I typed in HUMAN HUMAN HUMAN I NEED TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN BECAUSE I AM A HUMAN.

This went on for most of the day until I was finally given an email address for SUPPORT. Of course, it was a TOS (terms of service) email address, and my case was CLOSED by them because it wasn’t a terms of service issue. And I had to start all over again. Finally, at the end of the chat with the bot, I did what I always do when I’m trying to get a human being to help me on a customer service call (where you punch in 0 repeatedly until you by-pass all of the other prompts): I typed in HUMAN HUMAN HUMAN I NEED TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN BECAUSE I AM A HUMAN.

The bot replied: I see that you want to speak with a human, Elissa. Click HERE, and I will help you. So I did, and it brought me back to the same chatbot box. And then it said WE HAVE DISCOVERED THE PROBLEM, ELISSA: YOU HAVE NO ACCOUNT WITH US, ELISSA, AND YOU DO NOT EXIST.

And then I had to plead with them and explain that I did, and do, exist. I really do. And that if they went into my settings for my newsletter, they would see that it was connected to the email address that I gave them. Only, they said they couldn’t BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO ACCOUNT WITH US ELISSA AND YOU DO NOT EXIST.

NO WAIT — I DO I REALLY DO EXIST PLEASE BELIEVE ME was the last thing I answered. And at two in the morning, I realized that I had been calmly told that I didn’t exist by artificial intelligence, in the same way that HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey tells Astronaut Dave who has been locked out of his spacecraft and needs HAL to open the hatch so he can get back in or he’ll die, I’M SORRY, DAVE, I CAN’T DO THAT.

It took fifteen hours, six emails to an anonymous support email that went unread, invaluable help from a highly visible Substack writer friend who talked me down off the ledge, and: here we are. Ultimately, the fix took less than five minutes with a live human. But I lost fifteen hours of work, and the knowledge that had I not been able to get back in, years of my work — essays, interviews, recipes, art — would likely have been scrubbed because a chatbot decided that I DO NOT EXIST.

An existential crisis:

No sixty-year-old woman wants to hear from anyone that she does not exist with such great and absolute certainty but especially by someone who actually does not exist. It’s not a matter of paranoia or unresolved mommy (or daddy) issues, or that tiny problem with the extra chin you started to grow in your late fifties. No mid-life writer who is sort of on the quiet side, who is definitely not loud enough or sexy enough or cool enough, or who does not read The Right Things or appear at The Right Parties wants to hear this. Remember the Evelyn Couch scene in the Winn-Dixie grocery store parking lot in Fried Green Tomatoes? The one where she’s patiently waiting for a spot and gets cut off by two mean girls in a red VW Bug? Why does this happen? Because Mrs. Couch is invisible; she doesn’t exist to these women, or even her husband for that matter. When she welcomes him home one night wrapped in Saran Wrap, he walks right past her to the television set, sits down, and watches the sports channel.

The question of existence is reductionist and unequivocal, and is meant to be: it’s easier that way. Whole nations, whole ethnicities and races and religions and socioeconomic groups are regularly told that they don’t exist and therefore are simply not viable. I’m sorry, the Master Bot says, you do not exist, so you will be removed. We will pretend that you’re not here, you never happened, you’re irrelevant.

Here is the question on which the actual chatbot model is based: what is the simplest answer to the most basic question? If we can’t figure out what to do with you, we’ll just say you’re not real. You don’t exist. You’re invisible. Problem solved.

The answer We can’t help you because you don’t exist is foundational to our modern model of dehumanization, from the top down and at every level in between. In geopolitics, one group screams at another YOU DON’T EXIST and the other one answers NO YOU DON’T EXIST! and around and around we go, and we wonder why nothing can be solved. A few weeks ago, I was attempting to fill an expensive prescription that, literally, no pharmacy is interested in filling and no insurance company is interested in covering. I called my insurance company and I heard the nice man on the other hand clacking away on his keyboard. He came back to me and said According to our records, you don’t exist. I told him I had just filled another prescription using the same insurance, and it was no problem. It must have been a mistake, he said, because you don’t exist: there is no record of you. According to our records.

There’s a great old MASH episode when Hawkeye is mistakenly listed as dead; he no longer exists. The Army — Hawkeye is told they never make mistakes — has taken him off its payroll and has let his father back in Maine know that his son has died. Hawkeye has to jump through hoops to get reinstated in Life, although he hates the war he’s found himself in, hates the bloodshed and the battles and the death and the hopelessness. He wants to call home to let his father know he’s okay and that it was just an error, but he can’t: dead men can’t make phone calls.

And then, of course, there’s George Bailey, in It’s A Wonderful Life, who whispers in the throes of horrific despair that he wishes he had never been born. About to commit suicide, he instead flings himself into a snowy, raging river to rescue a jumper whose hat miraculously never comes off. George is granted his wish by this mysterious jumper and is instantly rendered unknown by his community; he no longer has a wife or children, a mother, a business, people who know and love him, or even hate him. He is just un-humaned, and irrelevant. But in that jump to save this other soul instead of taking his own life, George experiences a baptism of sorts and, in the language of my friends in recovery, the very meaning of service; he wanders through the Bardo seeing what the universe would be like without him, until he is brought back to his real life with all its human perils and pitfalls, and is given a second birth, a second chance. He will never beg to be rendered non-existent again.

LISTEN TO ME: I DO EXIST is what I said to the chatbot last night, as though it could understand me, and as though it even cared. And I came to realize that even in the throes of fury, and despair, and fear, and rage, and exhaustion, and the invisibility of life as a sixty year old woman living in a world that has decided that I am irrelevant, I am hanging on for dear life with my bloody fingertips, and I will not — not — go away.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.

Header photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash.

Good design is good business.

I started my design career as an industrial designer at Bose, designing consumer electronics. Since design was foreign to those around me, I was endlessly asked, “What’s an industrial designer?” — and sometimes even, “Do you design factories?” As funny as that was to hear over and over (and over), it did make me wonder, and actually concerned me, that the people around me didn’t know that there was an entire professional field focused on creating the products they see and use daily.

My friend and renowned industrial designer Michael DiTullo often gets the same “What is an industrial designer?” question. He usually responds with a helpful analogy: architects create buildings, industrial designers create products — industrial designers do for products what architects do for buildings. I love that analogy, especially since many of the first industrial designers were architects.

Now, working as a business designer, I regularly get the questions, “What’s a business designer?” or “What exactly is business design?” It’s a fair question since business design is a relatively new sub-field of design. And that question is why I started Business Design School — so we can learn the art of business design together.

So, what is a business designer? I’ll channel Michael for a second: a business designer does for businesses what an architect does for buildings. That’s all to say: a business designer designs businesses (elements of a business).

Business design is a field that applies design methodologies and principles to business challenges and strategy. It bridges and synchronizes between the goals of the business and the impact of design to deliver long-lasting, scalable value to an organization and meaningful connections to users and customers. Think of it like a hybrid practice that blends business acumen with creative problem-solving. The core goal of business design is to innovate and improve business models, processes, services, and strategies by focusing on human-centered design, user experience, and a deep understanding of customer needs.

If you can design a building, you can design a business. Let’s break down these words: business + design.

What is Design?

I recently saw Rai Inamoto, Founding Partner of I&CO, a business invention firm, describe design as a suitcase word. Inamoto shared that the term suitcase word was coined by the late Marvin Minsky, the co-founder of MIT’s AI lab — a suitcase word is a word which “means nothing by itself, but holds a bunch of things inside that you have to unpack.”

I unpack design as three things: a unique way of thinking, making, and deciding.

Thinking: Design as a way of thinking means reasoning through a space of ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity — to do this, designers use abductive reasoning rather than deductive or inductive.

Deductive reasoning is a logical process in which a conclusion is based on the alignment of multiple premises generally assumed to be true. It’s logical as long as the premises are known and true. For example, if all birds can fly (premise), and a sparrow is a bird (premise), then a sparrow can fly (conclusion).

Inductive reasoning is the opposite of deductive. It involves broad generalizations from observations of existing truths and then making general conclusions or theories. For example, every swan we have seen is white; therefore, all swans are white.

Abductive reasoning begins with an incomplete collection of observations and proceeds to a likely, possible explanation. It involves looking at the evidence and considering what could cause a given phenomenon — and it typically yields a hypothesis, which is tested. A good example is a doctor diagnosing a condition based on limited information. If a patient has a high fever and a sore throat (observations), one possible explanation (hypothesis) is that the patient has strep throat.

By thinking this way, designers effectively manage and make change where information is unclear, incomplete, and conflicting — where there is no obvious or near-obvious answer. It allows for a broad exploration of possibilities. As an industrial designer at Bose in the early 2000s, I was on a team tasked with designing a portable speaker for the iPod. Talk about an open-ended problem with no logical solution! We had some hard data points, including our existing (non-portable) SoundDock product and a plethora of competitive products already on the market, but what would a portable product from Bose look and function like? We used abductive reasoning to listen to our customers about their needs and desires and explore a ton of possibilities to diagnose the opportunity and get to our best answer.

Making: Design as a way of making means turning ideas into tangible (or digital) artifacts. Like abductive reasoning, making sets designers apart in that designers make to learn. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini said it well in their book Humanocracy, “The ethos is show, don’t tell. Build a styrofoam model, sketch something on a napkin, lay out a storyboard, shoot a video. The simple act of translating a concept into a thing often reveals hidden flaws and opportunities to make the idea better. Everyone needs to be a maker, to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and build something. While the sheer profligacy of experimentation — ‘Look at all this wasted effort!’ — may irk the bureaucratic mind, it’s the only way to get to the future first.”

Making things — or prototyping — is design as a craftinvolving technical skill, the ability to discern the level of detail or fidelity a given concept prototype requires to learn from it, and the courage to try and fail. Making prototypes allows us to see and hold the future without investing the time and treasure to get there. Designers test and refine their concepts to get to the best version of the idea. As Eric Beyer, Executive Director of Prototyping at 3D Color, once shared, “Prototyping is the ‘rough draft.’ The more rough drafts one does, the better the final outcome, usually.”

We made hundreds of prototypes to design the SoundDock Portable — ranging from a works-like prototype that was batteries, speakers, and wires seemingly strewn together on a cart (but it worked!) to looks-like models to explore size, form, and feel to looks-like/works-like prototypes you’d swear were the real thing (but they weren’t!). We made things, learned from them, made some more, refined them, and made again — we made to learn, and in doing so, we de-risked the ultimate decision to invest in the product development and business system required to bring a product to market and sell it to thousands of people.

Deciding: Design as a way of deciding is the culmination of design thinking and making — it’s why we design to make the most objective decision based on numerous subjective bits of evidence. It means making decisions based on research, data, and testing — choosing between options and alternatives. If you do the thinking and making right, you reduce the risk of investments in time and money your decisions generate — because we’re not just talking about immediate choices, we’re talking about long-term strategic choices that impact the future.

For the SoundDock Portable, we had to decide on functional features: how should it sound, how heavy should it be, and how long should it last so that it will meet the needs of our customers? We had to decide on aesthetics: what should it look like, how should it feel so that it will meet the desires of our customers? And we had to decide on the business aspects: how much will it cost us to make, how much can we sell it for, how do we position it in the market? We could confidently make these decisions because of all the design thinking and design making that came before.

What is Business?

Business is an organized system of sustained value exchange between a company, consisting of people, assets, and activities, and customers with needs and desires. Businesses transform talent, labor, and materials to create value, whether in the form of products, services, or solutions, and exchange this value with customers or clients — whose needs or desires are met by those products, services, or solutions — for other forms of value, typically money. Every business element in this framework can be thought about, prototyped, and decided on — it can all be designed. Let’s use a Business Design Framework, see above.

Customers— People with Needs & Desires
While you may not be able to design your customers, they are humans, after all — you can seek to understand your customers and frame opportunities based on their demand. Talking to customers is critical to business success. Call it user research, market research, whatever, but I agree with Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, when he says, “You’ll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.”

Take the Ford Maverick, for example — it’s a compact pickup truck Ford introduced in 2021. The Maverick’s development was a direct response to a growing market segment of customers that desired the versatility of a truck but in a more compact, fuel-efficient, and affordable package than larger model trucks like the Ford F-150. Ford recognized a niche for a smaller pickup that would appeal to urban dwellers and those needing a vehicle for everyday use and occasional hauling or adventure purposes. The Maverick was designed to meet these diverse needs. Ford now dominates the small-truck market.

Company — People + Activities + Assets​
A company is a group of people, activities, and assets, and there’s an entire field dedicated to designing them, called Organization Design. Organization design refers to the process of shaping an organization’s structure and roles to align with its business strategy, goals, and objectives. It involves creating a framework of activities that enables the organization to operate effectively and efficiently. Effective organization design considers various aspects, such as the distribution of resources, allocation of responsibilities, coordination of activities, and management of workflows.

You can design the configuration of your organizational structure, such as hierarchical, flat, matrix, or networked. Ford Motor Company has a traditional vertical hierarchy with a clear chain of command from top-level management to entry-level employees. The company is organized into various functional departments like finance, marketing, human resources, research and development, and manufacturing. Each department has its specific roles and responsibilities aligned with the company’s overall strategy. But Ford also exhibits characteristics of a matrix organizational structure, especially in its approach to product development, where creating a new product like the Maverick results from massive collaboration across different functional departments.

Organizing this way was a choice for Ford. Still, you can design different structures, like the collection of micro-enterprises that make up the global home appliance manufacturer Haier, which I wrote about in Issue 007. Or you can design a holacracy, like video game-maker Valve, which seemingly has no organization structure, where employees have significant autonomy — there are no managers — over what they spend their time on, how they collaborate, and what products or services they launch.

A company also consists of activities and assets which can also be designed. For example, Ford’s internal activities include research and development and financial management — you can design how you do R&D and, yes, you can design how you do financial management (see Issue 008), in that you can think, make, and decide how these activities are run (keeping in mind there are generally accepted accounting principles and as a public company Ford is held to certain standards of financial reporting). Ford’s external activities include marketing and advertising to promote products and their brand image and selling and distributing vehicles through a network of dealerships globally.

Assets are resources with economic value that a business owns and controls with the expectation that they will provide future benefits. Assets are definitely designed. Ford’s tangible assets include their manufacturing plants, the factories where they build the Maverick, and all the machines and equipment they use to make vehicles. The yet-to-be-sold inventory of vehicles is also an asset. There’s also corporate real estate, like office buildings and research centers, that they own and operate in — all physical assets designed to achieve business goals. There are also intangible assets like the Ford brand and reputation in the market, customer relationships and loyalty, and their intellectual property like patents and proprietary technology. Everything is designed.

Designing a Value Proposition

Your company, activities, and assets generate your market offering or value proposition. A value proposition is a statement that clearly identifies the benefits a product or service will provide to a specific target audience, explaining why it is superior to other alternatives in the market. It’s essentially the promise of value to be delivered and a primary reason a consumer should buy from you. And it’s useful in aligning the various elements of your business around a common strategy. In crafting a value proposition, businesses highlight the unique value they offer customers. Because you can design your company, activities, and assets, you can shape your value proposition. Here’s a high-level approach:

1. Identify your key customer — know who they are and understand their needs, preferences, pain points, and behaviors.
2. Outline benefits and features — note the key features of your product or service and translate each into benefits for the customer, showing how it makes their lives better, easier, or more enjoyable.
3. Differentiate from competitors — understand your competitor’s value propositions and articulate what makes yours unique by highlighting unique selling points (USPs) — things like quality, price, innovation, customer service, etc.
4. Craft a clear, concise statement — combine your understanding of your audience, the problem you solve, and your USPs into an easy-to-understand, compelling statement; for example, The Ford Maverick offers an efficient, versatile, and affordable urban truck experience, combining the utility of a pickup with the comfort and fuel economy of a compact car.
5. Test and validate — share your value proposition with potential customers to get feedback and refine as needed.
6. Implement across your business — ensure that all aspects of your business (people, activities, and assets) are aligned with delivering the promised value, and communicate it clearly through marketing and customer relationships.

Value Exchange

All this business design leads to the value exchange — where your business trades a valuable product, service, or solution with a customer for money. Since you can design what goes into a value exchange, you can design how you exchange value with your customers. How you accept funds is one of the most critical aspects of the buying experience — and it can be a significant differentiator. Look at Amazon’s “1-Click” or “Buy Now” button, which allows customers to make an online purchase with a single click that bypasses the traditional online shopping cart + checkout process, streamlining the purchasing experience. Amazon had a patent on this (since expired and now adopted by many other online retailers), US Patent No. 5,960,411, titled “Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network.”

Historically, Ford, like most automakers, relies on a network of franchised dealerships to sell its vehicles. The value exchange is multi-tiered. First, Ford manufactures vehicles and sells them to the dealerships — providing them with marketing, training, and after-sales services — then the dealer sells them to the customer, handling customer interactions, test drives, financing, and post-purchase services like maintenance.

In the late 1990s, Ford experimented with redesigning the value exchange with their Ford Collections initiative — the idea was to create company-owned dealerships that consolidated various Ford brands under one roof and allowed them to control and streamline the customer experience more directly. The company designed and launched pilot “Collections” in a few markets to test the idea, including Tulsa, Oklahoma, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Rochester, NY.

This business design did not perform as well as expected — Ford Collections struggled to achieve the projected efficiencies and improvements to the customer experience. But more dramatically, the move faced serious resistance from Ford dealers concerned about the competition from company-owned dealerships. There are also laws in the US that generally restrict automotive manufacturers from owning and operating dealerships due to franchise laws and regulations designed to protect independent dealers. Between lack of performance and legal challenges, Ford reversed course three years into the experiment and divested from their company-owned dealerships. Not every business design is a winner. Although the Collections initiative was unsuccessful, it gave Ford valuable insights into retail operations and the importance of dealer relationships. It also highlighted the complexities of changing entrenched distribution systems in the automotive industry.

Business Model

This framework represents your business model, consisting of customer needs, company structure, activities, and assets, meeting in the middle with the all-important value exchange. A business model is a conceptual framework that describes how a company creates, delivers, and captures value. It’s essentially a blueprint for how a business operates and makes money, encompassing its products or services, customer base, and financial and operational strategies. Because a business model is a series of choices, you can design it.

Ford Motor Company’s business model primarily revolves around designing, manufacturing, and selling a wide range of vehicles, including cars, trucks, and SUVs, along with automotive parts and accessories, complemented by a network of franchised dealerships for sales and service. Contrast that business model with that of Carvana. Carvana is an online-only used car retail platform allowing customers to buy, sell, and finance used vehicles online. This model eliminates the need for traditional physical dealerships, offering features like a 360-degree view of vehicles, home delivery, and a seven-day return policy, prioritizing convenience, transparency, and customer experience in the used car market — different choices, different designs.

Design is a series of informed choices stacked on top of each other until you get to the outcome. (Hopefully, the outcome you designed for — in the case of the Ford Maverick, it was; for Ford Collections, it wasn’t — but we try, test, and learn). In that way, anything can be designed because everything is a series of choices — including a business. And that’s what business designers do — combine business management with design thinking, making, and deciding to achieve a powerful mixture of economic and human outcomes.

Sam Aquillano is an entrepreneur, design leader, writer, and founder of Design Museum Everywhere. This post was originally published in Sam’s twice-monthly newsletter for the creative-business-curious, Business Design School. Check out Sam’s book, Adventures in Disruption: How to Start, Survive, and Succeed as a Creative Entrepreneur.

Images courtesy the author.

And on their lips.

If I didn’t have 37 conversations about AI last week, I had 38.

Granted, some were self-imposed. See, I’m working on a presentation on the subject of unlocking creativity. And spoiler alert: AI holds some of the keys.

But no matter what, AI is not on the QT. It’s front and center.

Now, what I thought might be helpful for you is to simply share a bit about my experience with AI.

And before you get too excited, understand I’m no expert.

I’m just a dude messing around with a keyboard and a bunch of platforms and ideas.

First things first, AI isn’t new. The vision of a machine with human characteristics has been around since the ancient Greeks brought us Talos, a giant bronze automaton who guarded Crete.

But things got quite serious in 1956 when scientists at Dartmouth attended the first AI workshop. And started to fiddle around with the notion of machines thinking and being like humans.

(According to Wikipedia, in 1955, John McCarthy, then a young Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College, decided to organize a group to clarify and develop ideas about thinking machines. He picked the name ‘Artificial Intelligence’ for the new field.)

Fast forward to today and AI has become all the rage due to the advancements in computing power, software sophistication, machine learning and the wide availability of big data.

Oh, and let’s not forget: hype! Media and social media hype is contributing to the accelerated adoption, too. (FYI, it took ChatGPT only 2 months to get to 100 million users. For perspective, it took TikTok 9 months to reach the same amount of users. Uber: 6 years and six months!)

Now, I started my journey with the words. What the heck are we really talking about?

Here are some definitions:

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The idea and field of study that machines can think and act like humans.

Machine Learning

A way of teaching computers to learn from data, instead of just following a set of rules or protocol.

Deep Learning

A type of Machine Learning (see above) that uses artificial neural networks (think lots of electronic brains) that learn complex patterns in data.

Generative AI (GenAI)

A type of artificial intelligence that can create new content like text, images and videos.

Large Language Models (LLMs)

Powerful AI systems that can understand and generate human-like text.

Ok, there you have it from the general to the specific.

I’ve mostly been playing around with LLMs and GenAI.

And this is where you can start to play around and apply it to your work.

Here are some use-cases and platforms that I’m using.

OpenAI

For general info and questions. Also, not half-bad for writing limericks.

Microsoft Copilot

Questions. And prompts. Also used this once to take a Teams meeting recording and organize it into coherent notes.

Perplexity

I like this one for questions and for writing routine things. For example, Perplexity is perfect for giving you a rough draft on what you might say in a complaint about your electric bill.

You could also ask Perplexity about the 5 best ways to get out of a ticket if you have to go up against the DMV.

Claude

I like this one to organize notes and turn a mass (and a mess) of thinking into a presentation outline.

Also good to ask for things like recipes. “Claude, I have two cans of garbanzo beans and some olive oil, what can I make for dinner with that?” And next thing you know there’s four Mediterranean-inspired recipes.

Now for images…it’s GenAI.

Midjourney

This platform gives you quite a bit of options and styles. I’ll prompt it like this: “…/imagine an iconic representation of Artificial Intelligence done in the artistic style of Rene Magritte.” (That’s the first prompt I used for the image above.) The only drawback to Midjourney is you sign up for it through another platform, Discord. It makes the initial start of the process a bit clumsy.

Dall-E

This platform offers an elegant and easy user experience. And almost as many artistic styles as Midjourney.

Google Gemini

A bit newer and working its kinks out.

Sono

I recently played around with this A.I. to write a song. I had no reason to write a song but it was fun.

So there you have it. A primer of sorts on AI.

Oh, and in case you were wondering this post was written in RobGPT.

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Header image courtesy the author, created in Midjourney.

The Color and Shape of Trust

Kahneman’s distinction between System 1 (fast, instinctual, and emotional) and System 2 (slower, more deliberative, and logical) thinking processes offers a valuable lens through which to view the impact of design choices, specifically typography, color and shape in branding. Typography can elicit feelings of modernity or tradition and with color theory taps directly into System 1, eliciting immediate, visceral responses that can align with a brand’s identity and values before the consumer fully articulates why they feel a certain way. This immediate reaction to these elements can set the foundation for numerous emotions, such as trust or innovation, attributes that are crucial for long-term brand loyalty and valuation.

Similarly, the psychology of shapes can appeal to instinctual preferences, with certain forms evoking safety, stability, or dynamism, engaging consumers on an intuitive level. Kahneman’s insights into the cognitive biases that shape our perceptions underscore the strategic use of shapes in branding, guiding the emotional and psychological responses that contribute to a brand’s identity.

Narrative Storytelling and Behavioral Economics

Kahneman’s work on the narrative fallacy—the tendency to create a story post-hoc so that events make sense—highlights the power of narrative storytelling in branding. Brands that tell compelling stories do not just market a product; they engage consumers in a narrative that feels inevitable and true. This storytelling aligns with Kahneman’s observations on how humans are driven by coherence in the stories they tell themselves, making the narrative a potent tool for brands aiming to secure a place in the consumer’s worldview. Moreover, a strong, coherent brand story can enhance the perceived potential of a company, influencing not just consumer behavior but also shaping investor expectations about future growth and success.

The Behavioral Science of Brand Valuation

Kahneman’s work in behavioral psychology offers invaluable perspectives on brand valuation, particularly through the lens of prospect theory. This theory, a cornerstone of Kahneman’s research, provides a framework for understanding decision-making under uncertainty, illuminating the cognitive biases that influence both consumer and investor behaviors.

Prospect theory posits that people value gains and losses differently, placing more emotional weight on potential losses than on equivalent gains. This asymmetry can have profound implications for how brands are perceived and valued. For example, a brand that successfully mitigates perceived risks through consistent performance and clear, trustworthy communication can appeal to the aversion to loss that Kahneman describes. By emphasizing the stability and reliability of their offerings, brands can position themselves as ‘safer’ investments or purchases, potentially enhancing their appeal to conservative consumers and investors sensitive to loss’s psychological pain.

Moreover, Kahneman’s identification of the ‘endowment effect’—where individuals ascribe more value to things merely because they own them—offers another layer of insight into brand valuation. Brands that can foster a sense of ownership and personal connection with their consumers may benefit from this bias, as the perceived value of the brand increases simply because consumers feel a personal stake in its story and success.

Additionally, Kahneman’s exploration of ‘anchoring’—the tendency for people to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered when making decisions—highlights the importance of first impressions in branding. A brand that effectively communicates its value proposition from the outset can set a positive ‘anchor’ in the minds of potential consumers and investors, influencing all subsequent perceptions and decisions related to the brand. This initial communication doesn’t just inform; it shapes the perceived value and risk associated with the brand, thereby affecting its overall valuation.

Kahneman’s work also sheds light on the ‘halo effect,’ where the perception of one positive attribute (e.g., high-quality products) leads to biased assumptions about other aspects of the brand (e.g., ethical business practices). Brands that excel in one area can leverage this bias to enhance their overall valuation, as consumers and investors extrapolate from known strengths to form a holistic, albeit biased, view of the brand’s value.

By integrating these biases and heuristics identified by Kahneman into their strategies, brands can more effectively communicate their value proposition, aligning with psychological patterns in decision-making that influence both consumer choice and investor judgment. This strategic alignment not only elevates the brand in the marketplace but also enhances its valuation, as investors perceive the brand as better positioned to navigate risks and capitalize on opportunities, thanks to its deep understanding of the psychological underpinnings of consumer and investor behavior.

This post was originally published on Lynda’s LinkedIn newsletter, Marketing without Jargon. Lynda leads a team at Decker Design that focuses on helping law firms build differentiated brands.

Header photo licensed through Unsplash+ in collaboration with Katelyn Perry.

I need some advice. I can’t stop doom scrolling and it’s really put me in a mood, feeling helpless, hopeless, and like it’s a losing battle. I know I can google what to do, but you always have sage advice (pun intended) I thought I’d go direct to you.

As someone who has come to learn — the hard way — that caring about the world is not mutually exclusive to caring about yourself, I dashed off my quick, go-to advice in response. (Lightly edited, because texting):

1. Get offline
2. Throw yourself into something you can control – work, redoing your resume, whatever
3. Look for GOTV opportunities — letters to voters, something that will make a difference
4. Really, get offline. Watch movies. I’m bingeing Shameless right now. We watched The Shining with the kids last night. Totally changes your headspace
5. Know you’re not alone.

#1 makes a lot of us uncomfortable.

How can we get offline when there are breaking news stories all day long? And then analysis of those news stories? Op-eds responding to the news stories, then the analysis of the op-eds responding to the news stories? And then the backlash to the op-eds about the analysis of the news stories… ?

Rinse. Repeat.

Forever.

The issue is that “news” (current events) is not the same as “the news” (the programs and media channels that share it all day long, 24/7).

Since the advent of the 24-hour news cycle in the mid-’90s — you might remember when it started if you’re old enough to have a visceral response to the words “white Bronco” — we have been programmed to conflate “news” and “the news.”

If there is reporting on my screen all day long, it must be important.

I value the work of objective, dedicated journalists tremendously. I donate to causes that support their reporting and their safety. Their work is important. However our bodies and minds were not built to process constant fear, outrage, trauma, and strife all day, every day.

Then I am reminded of my own socially-conscious activist mom, and those like her who existed in the world before The CNN Effect and Al Gore’s Internet.

They were perfectly well-informed reading a paper or two each morning, the weekly news magazines when they arrived, then checking in with the evening news at night.

(Not that there aren’t incredible benefits to the widespread availability and democratization of more perspectives to more people today, but that’s another topic.)

And here I come back to what I referred to as the privilege to look away.

It sounds awful at first, but not all privileges are bad. Some privileges are yours to use for the benefit of something greater.

A few months back, I wrote that watching the news 24/7 is not in fact doing something.

Watching the same tragic footage over and over is not helping a single person in need. It’s not creating conditions for peace, it’s not bringing home hostages, it’s not ridding the world of terrorism, it’s not stopping a single bomb, it’s not supporting people in crisis, it’s not slowing the chilling rise in anti-Semitism, it’s not building more affordable housing, it’s not closing the pay gap, it’s not getting out the vote for sensible candidates, it’s not putting more kindness into the world.

Try this exercise

For those of you with big hearts, a commitment to doing the right thing, and more news anxiety than you would prefer, I’m begging you — us — to get out of the doom-scrolling cycle.

Here’s an exercise I learned, thanks to a lot of ideas from a lot of people who are far smarter than me.

When I find myself randomly scrolling a social feed for more than a few minutes, I make myself aware that I am. Then I stop and focus on the questions: What am I doing here and what am I looking for?

When I have my intention clear in my head, I can make a better choice.

• If I am looking for something I can do to help, I pick one and take action.
• If I am looking for ideas to help me form my opinions, I like/comment/share. In part to amplify for others, and in part to let the people who are putting it out there these days know that things they are saying are meaningful.
• If I am looking for in-depth analysis, I save the articles, videos, and long posts I want to read in a bookmarking site like The Pocket App. Then I set aside one period of reading time a few times a week to go through them. (Sometimes I don’t get to them as soon as I’d like, but they are ready for me when I am ready for them.)
• If I am looking for a reminder that there are good people in the world, I screenshot or bookmark to a “humanity” folder so I can come back to it when I need.
• If I am just bored or looking for a break from work or a quick distraction, I close the app and do something else. I’ll text someone I’m missing, call my parents, clean something (I have a lot of things to clean), listen to a short podcast episode, browse the Nordstrom sale (there’s always a sale), ask my kids to send me a funny meme, jot down some ideas for articles, organize some photos, or just play a quick Monday crossword from the NYT archives.

Funny enough, I think this last point is often the reason we get ourselves stuck in the infinite scroll in the first place.

It’s probably good to remember that we’re not going to get a break by immersing ourselves deeper in the very thing we need a break from.

As for my friend, he texted again the next morning:

Back to nighttime passive meditation, meal prep, and Suits. And trying not to doom scroll. Which is hard.

It is hard. But we keep trying. This world needs all the healthy, well-rested, big-hearted people we can get.

Liz Gumbinner is a Brooklyn-based writer, award-winning ad agency creative director, and OG mom blogger who was called “funny some of the time” by an enthusiastic anonymous commenter. This was originally posted on her Substack “I’m Walking Here!,” where she covers culture, media, politics, and parenting.

Header photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in art education, I went back to college to study graphic design. Because my first round in college was less than stellar, during my second time at college, I vowed to do everything I could to excel. The reasons for that dip my first time around are for another post.

When I went back, I was behind in the computer proficiency department. My younger classmates knew how to use the computer and the software. Their final submissions were the object of my envy on one too many occasions. Though we were still doing many projects by hand, others required a computer.

I had to capitalize on what I knew while I learned what I did not know. I knew research and sketching. Thus, there were few projects on which I was not willing to go deep and deeper if needed. I started to realize that design can be described as a two-part process: ideation and production.

Ideation necessitates iteration. To learn to think like a designer, one needs to be willing to try things over and over and over again. Sometimes, changing all the variables, sometimes a few variables, and sometimes just changing one variable. Before a project gets fine-tuned to meet its deadline, the ideation process is full of possibilities and options. An idea can take an infinite number of twists and turns. A twist can be the result of research or more reading. A turn can be that a typeface choice is disastrous once the printouts hang on the wall (in my classes, always upside down). Or we can realize that the format needs reconsideration altogether.

Ideation involves everything from brainstorming, researching to gain a better understanding, empathizing with the intended audience, sketching solutions and ideas, sketching some more, talking about the sketches, making connections, seeing what was unseen before, revising and revising, critiquing, giving feedback, letting those aha moments come and go. Then we do it all over again. Each part of the design process is almost a Pandora’s box. However, in design, this box is full of possibilities. And I absolutely love that.

When my student reacted hesitantly to my request to revise and try at least three different options, it woke me up. It is true that some of us are in the design profession only to earn a living or simply to have a job. But design is not all “business.” Design is a very alive and organic process that enables the creator to make interesting and unexpected connections in order to make a message visual to others. The organic process creates a rich and fertile ground for work to flourish.

There is a caveat, of course. As much as design might be like a Pandora’s Box full of ideas and connections we did not know or realize, that box needs to be fed, and it needs to be fed constantly. We feed it without much effort. Our minds process many visuals daily. We don’t realize it, but we take a lot in from the object we are looking at, its texture, placement, weight, height, colors, and many other variables. I am trying to say that each particular object of visual interest possesses much more information in itself. We need to intentionally feed our brains with content—good content—be it literature, music, theater, walks, and even the occasional out-of-range source to come up with twists and turns worth pursuing. Otherwise, our mind will spit out a recycled wave of what we have seen before.

Design is engaging with ideas and having a conversation with them. To engage these ideas, we need to be committed to the process. I would lie if I did not acknowledge that my box has been less open at certain moments in my life. Of course, we have ups and downs. But, to quote something an art teacher told me: If you don’t feed your talent, it goes away. I did not believe it then until I found it hard to think creatively again. 

One of my favorite TED talks is Your Elusive Creative Genius by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, and Love. In it, she recalls meeting with American poet Ruth Stone, who described how sometimes her poetry came to her in the field, and she had to run to her house and write, almost grabbing the idea by its tail so it would not go away. Gilbert remarks on how her experience makes her feel like a mule. A mule that she had to push with sweat and labor to painfully produce an idea. While this contrast is dramatic for these two creatives, one thing is true: the ideas will go away to find another vessel through which they can make their way out into the world. 

I want to be there for these ideas. My description of the design process is not a scientific one. It is a practical one but sprinkled with a lot of my idealism about how design works. Yes, I believe in design. I think we should teach it in elementary and secondary schools. Though design has many valid solutions to a problem, unlike a math problem, it is through design’s process that we find solutions fitting for the problem we might be engaged with. The process makes us more human.

My student’s hesitation saddened me because their potential is great. All I can offer is a taste and hope that the taste makes them hungry for more.

Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This is an edited version of an original post on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.

Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash.

This is my fourth book — my fifth if you include my twenty-year-old, very dated cookbook — and you would think that I’d understand by now that there is a direct correlation between my health and my writing life. The peeling-back-of-layers, the digging deep, the obsession — they can all be overwhelming; writing is not, as some like to portray it, particularly romantic, despite what we see on Instagram. On the one hand, it is, more often than not emotionally exhausting, even when the work is going very well. On the other hand, there is also an absolute physicality to it, not unlike being a loosehead on a rugby team. I’ve played women’s rugby exactly once, and the last thing I remember after an opposing teammate grabbed the collar of my jersey straight-armed and flung me backward through the air like a candy wrapper was Keep your head up, Elissa. Everything else bore the brunt when I eventually hit the ground: my shoulders, arms, hands, knees, feet, hips. Even my ass was bruised.

Writing is not much different.

I admire my writer friends who develop routines that transcend the emotional and physical impact of doing this work; these are the ones who wake up early and meditate every morning for twenty minutes, or who get up and go to a meeting and then to yoga or the gym, and then come back to their desk. I would like to be one of them, and at times I have been. But ultimately, this is not how I’m wired: if I’m in the throes of working on something that is picking up speed, I usually can’t wait to get back to my desk first thing in the morning, and if that happens, I often don’t move until the end of the day. When I try to stand up, my joints sound like a rusting hinge on an old farmhouse door.

I wrote my first book when I was in my mid-forties and still commuting to Manhattan every day for my editorial director job, which was also sedentary, as was my very long train trip. It went like this: car to station to train to office to train to station to car to couch. Decompress, dinner, bed. Up at five. Rinse; repeat. The result: a book I was and still am proud of (just re-released in 2024), many chiropractic sessions with a dweeby young man/pisher who first asked me how old I was (by then, fifty), and then announced You own your back pain. I found a massage therapist who I started seeing twice a month, went back to the gym, and POOF: no more pain.

I wrote my second book a few years later, and infrequently commuting to Manhattan for my editor-at-large job, also sedentary. Same train trip, same hours. My body began to settle like a house. The result: a book I was and still am proud of (also just re-released in 2024), severe lower back pain, an epidural injection that was an epic fail (and a nightmare) and many acupuncture sessions with an absolute god of a man who has since, I gather, moved to Bhutan.

Yes, everyone is stretched, and insurance is a disaster of a business straight out of the cheese shop skit from Monty Python.

I wrote my third book when I was in my late fifties, no longer commuting, but in charge of my mother’s eldercare in New York, which required my jumping into the car and racing in from Connecticut on average a few times a week — I’m two hours away — to fix problems that could have been handled over the phone in minutes. The book was about this issue: becoming a primary caregiver for an emotionally estranged, constitutionally angry parent despite a very long history of mutual acrimony and animosity. Can the dark side of such a relationship ever be transcended? A complicated memoir, and I do not recommend writing any story from its middle while it is unfolding. By the time that book came out in hardcover exactly a year before the Covid lockdown, my body had changed profoundly, in part because of the stress of excavating the subject matter, but also in part because I had spent about an entire decade sitting on my rear.

My fourth book has just gone into production; I turned sixty last June. The creaks and crunching and grinding of joints is no longer a bother, but an actual thing requiring, I am told, some level of extreme seriousness on my part. As a former (keyword: FORMER) athlete (tennis, squash, swimming, skiing) I just assume I can haul myself back from the brink, only: not so much. I’m hearing helpful words of wisdom from people in the medical field along the lines of FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T GO TO THE GYM UNTIL WE GET THE SCANS BACK. I’ve also discovered exactly how much the “wellness” community has changed in the last decade: no one talks to anyone else anymore. Doctor A no longer talks to Doctor B or Doctor C, and if you need, say, a bone scan because you feel like you’ve gotten just a smidge shorter since Obama was in the White House, go ahead and make the appointment yourself and be prepared to pay out of pocket for it. After that, you need to find someone to read the scans, and then treat you for the osteopenia you developed around Book 2, that your then-doctor never bothered telling you about because she doesn’t believe in it despite the fact that your bones are beginning to resemble Swiss cheese. If you’re a guy, you’ll have your own unmentionable problems, and I wish you luck with them.

There’s also the little issue of diet. Sit on your ass for many hours a day, and your metabolism has gone to bed, perhaps forever. If you’re over fifty, you get to be told by Doctor B that, as a post-menopausal woman, you’re essentially screwed. Eat some fish; you’ll feel better. The last time my doctor told me that, I said Let’s talk diet: which is your favorite — Mediterranean? Vegan? Vegetarian? Keto? Paleo? Low-Carb? Low- Sugar? What? What’s good for a clinically depressed, post-menopausal writer who sits in an expensive Aeron Chair for hours every day? She just looked at me, like I was crazy.

In other words: one hand has no idea what the other one is doing. Yes, everyone is stretched, and insurance is a disaster of a business straight out of the cheese shop skit from Monty Python. If doctors want us to DON’T GOOGLE (mine, the one who “missed” years of markers for osteopenia and then tried to cover it up by saying she didn’t believe in it), they need to understand something: we will take control if they don’t. We will find the answers. We will haul ourselves out of our expensive Aeron chairs and pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and put ourselves on the healing road with or without your help, and without the benefit of more and more and more medication that will line your wallets and those of your pharma distributors.

But first, we’ll need a nap.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack.

Header photo licensed through Unsplash+ in collaboration with Ave Calvar.

I was less keen on seeing a duckling being eaten by a crow at the base of the Eiffel Tower. That was … not great. Fascinating seeing how in the blink of an eye it brought together onlookers from all corners of the world in a frenzy of despair and fruitless attempts to help. THANK YOU SYMBOLIC DUCKLING.

Some recent work for Footnote and the New York Times over on my IG. Should probably get about to updating my portfolio site at some point.

Found and scanned by P&C: The Function of Colour in Schools & Hospitals, 1930. Eery as heck, like an anime high school version of The Shining.

Very excited to see Ian McQue’s narrative art book MILESHIPS appear on Kickstarter. It has of course smashed its funding target, but get your name on that order list now because this is going to be beautiful.

Just discovered Magnum’s collection of darkroom prints; iconic photos (like this 1967 Erich Hartmann shot of a snowstorm in New York) marked up with all the printing annotation and numbers and whathaveyou. A fascinating arcane language.

Snail-mailed typewriter interviews, you say? Now that’s a speed of social media I can get behind.

Myself and the child were having a big LEGO sort yesterday and discovered something quite wonderful – the shelves/dividers of Ikea Kallax shelves are exactly two studs wide, and will hold a simple bracket shape unsupported. So many possibilities! Some pics of it in action here. Swedish/Danish cooperation at its finest.

See also: neat new Ikea ads by INGO Hamburg.

Do I need this Yoko Ono t-shirt?

That is all.

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header photo by Nil Castellví on Unsplash.

Sam Aquillano: Today, we have a special conversation to dive into a strategic approach to looking at the design of finance and accounting. This guy actually makes finance and accounting fun. We’re joined by Jamie Odegaard. Jamie has paved an untraditional path from advertising to carpenter to CEO for private equity. He’s now the CEO of Aardvark, a financial strategy studio for the creative industry. They help owners build a more successful business around the work that they love. Among other things, Aardvark is a fractional finance department, as they say, it’s kind of like your cool new friend that happens to give expert financial advice and make your accounting a breeze. Jamie loves helping small business owners understand the strategic financial insights that lead to success. Welcome, Jamie. It’s so great to chat with you.

Jamie Odegaard: Thanks, Sam. That’s a warm and generous introduction.

SA: I’d love to learn more about you and your background, I love a good origin story. So what was the spark that was like: we have to make Aardvark happen.

JO: I think the origin story is rooted in a lot of long suffering and hard lessons learned. I don’t have a formal financial background, I sort of came into this world in a really circuitous way, but also having sort of learned the hard way, about what’s important for small business. And over the last 10 years of my career, I’ve run businesses for owners that didn’t have any financial perspective other than evaluating the size of their bank account.

But if you sort of operate things on a cleaner basis from a financial point of view, it unlocks more opportunities and you’re probably allowing yourself to experience if you didn’t have that. So that’s what’s rewarding about the work that we do. And the origin of Aardvark in particular was, I was coming off of a stint working for a very sophisticated ownership group from a financial perspective and I learned a lot. And when I when I left that work, I was just talking to other friends of mine that were running businesses and it was very easy for me to start to explain the power of these financial concepts to them in a way that hadn’t been for me previously. And I think just a couple of really basic ideas set off a lot of possibility for these businesses.

SA: What types of companies are you mostly chatting with and what patterns are you seeing across them?

JO: Small agencies and film production studios are the largest two cohorts, but I think the common thread for all everybody that we engage with is that usually there’s a project-based accounting structure to their business, meaning they’re winning large projects, sometimes not so large, but the money comes in chunks through winning work, right, whether it’s brand work for an agency, or corporate work, or spot work for a film production company. So the commonality is that these companies have to manage their finances in the same way as they operate.

SA: What keeps these folks up at night? What are they worried about versus more of a traditional business?

JO: I would say like right now they’re mostly worrying about things that we can’t control, which is business development, you know? But I think downstream of that is, cash management, so when you’re earning money on a project basis, the revenues come in a very lumpy inconsistent way. And so managing that inflow has a couple of different components. There’s a profitability component, and then there’s the actual timing and cash management component.

The method of making the thing has some intrinsic inefficiencies with it, right? If you think about an artist, like in an artist process, they probably don’t love to have to filter through an efficiency lens if they’re making something that they’re very proud of from an artistic standpoint. But when you’re running a business and you have to pay payroll and you have to provide for your own family, you’re sort of forced into thinking about those things a little bit. So we can decide to spend, you know, 20 extra hours tweaking this brand identity, because it’s just going to sing when we do it. But we’re going to do it with the knowledge that, there’s going to be some offsetting costs that’s going to create some difficulty maybe for another part of the business.

SA: What are the services that Aardvark brings to bear to support? I can’t help but think about myself as a creative founder and I wish I had your phone number back then.

JO: The format that we prefer is if somebody sees us as a partner to own the financial responsibility of their business in terms of the way that the machine works. We’re not involved in the business development piece of it, but everything from providing perspective about pricing and what some benchmarks should be for profitability for example.

So we help with invoicing, we run payroll, we do all of the transactional bookkeeping. We do some long term projects if the business needs more time to confront certain aspects and in the meantime, we do everything that’s required on a weekly basis: like paying vendors, helping with like invoice management, and more.

SA: Do you even get into financial therapy? I imagine sometimes you’re chatting with these owners and you’re like, sit on the couch, lay back and let Jamie hear your troubles.

JO: Yeah, there’s plenty of that. I mean, math is very like clarifying, right? And so the finances of a small business, the problem is always easy to determine. There are only a few, sort of moving parts that would be responsible for driving an outcome of a small business — we can probably reduce it to four items. And so making the determination about the issue is the simple part. It’s what you do with that information, how that information makes you feel as an owner is the tricky part. And how to translate that into execution.

So for instance, if you win a project that’s not especially profitable — and it coincides with a raise that you promised a team member that’s key to producing that work. What are you going to do with that? The math is clear: you can either, not give the person the raise, or you can give them the raise, it’s a pretty binary choice — they’re going to have different outcomes for the business. So the way that feels for a business owner is brutal, but the math is easy — you’re either adding or you’re subtracting.

SA: I’m so curious how you actually work with clients, what’s your process? Say I’m a new client, I’m coming in, I’ve got some of the challenges we just talked about, how do you get started and roll them through your process?

JO: So typically it starts like on the bookkeeping side of things. So we take on the QuickBooks Online or Zero file as part of the onboarding process, and then we usually spend a decent amount of time understanding the business through that lens by asking questions like, why is this balance in this account? What happened here? This doesn’t make sense. Why does it say that a bank owes you $2,000? Banks don’t owe people money.

But usually that’s the starting point because we’re taking that file on, that’s our responsibility now. So we need to make sure that it makes sense. But then from there and through conversations with the owner about how things work, how they’re running their business, we typically make some changes to the chart of accounts, the profit and loss statement, which is the financial statement that most business owners look at most frequently. And so a lot of times the relationship between income and expense for direct expenses are not represented accurately enough to give you a perspective in how you’re doing as a business. So we typically ask the owner, is it okay if we change these things around?

SA: I think some people might think like, finance is finance. Accounting is accounting. Are you customizing for me?

JO: I think we’re a little bit different in the operational perspective that we infuse into the work. Just recognizing a transaction and labeling it is not a rarefied skill set. But if you’re asking questions about why that’s taking place and making a shift about how to more effectively demonstrate what the assembled story will look like as a function of how the finances are being represented on the financial statements, that’s unique value.

SA: That’s the story, right? That’s the story behind the numbers that is going to help you make better decisions.

JO: Yeah, exactly. I think the reason that finance feels so dry to a lot of people is because like there’s a disconnect between the reports and the story.

SA: Yeah, it’s in there, right? I was always told like when I was getting my MBA and I was running my business, accounting professor promised me that eventually you will feel the numbers. Then like 10 years in, I was actually starting to feel it — it was like the force.

JO: Yeah, hopefully! I mean, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. That’s the good part. But it took me a long time to really have an appreciation for what these documents could do. If they’re like designed in the right way and presented in the right way.

SA: I want to get specific and maybe we get back to that profit and loss statement. How do you design a P&L?

JO: When you’re starting a business, a lot of times what happens is you propose a certain service, say, I build websites, you know, and then their client or the next client might be like, well, can you do SEO? And you’re a small business and so you say, sure! I’ll figure it out. And before you know it, you can have eight different services that you offer.

So starting at the top of the income statement, in the revenue, we clarify the different types of revenue, the different income accounts so that you can see, oh, you know, we’re getting $100,000 for building websites, we’re getting only $15,000 a year in SEO work, but we’ve been representing ourselves as an SEO provider.

It’s usually like breaking one account line into like four, to clarify what it is the business does. And then the next sort of group down are the direct costs and we’re clarifying those as well. Right. So we’re saying what expenses in your business those income lines correspond to, so pretty clearly you can see the relationship between income and expense — how much does it cost you to produce the thing that you sell?

SA: I told my dad once when I was getting into design that design shapes the world and he was like, and he’s a CFO, he said, Sam, finance shapes the world. And I was like, oh, darn it. You know, a decade later, I was like, you’re right, Dad. But again, you can tell the number story through a human lens that you can take action on and iterate on. You might be telling yourself one story and the numbers are going to tell you something else.

SA: Let’s talk about cash management. I hear it from small businesses that I mentor. I think small business owners feel like cashflow just sort of happens to you. It’s just something that like occurs, but in talking to you and learning more about your work and of course, just getting more into my business, you can design cash management, at least strategies. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you do that.

JO: Cash management and cash flow is largely driven by two things: profitability and the timing of the money coming in and out of the business. It’s interesting, you can have a relatively modest profit margin in your business and still manage cash effectively. If you’re losing money, your ability to manage cash effectively is going to be finite because you’re going to run out of the very fuel that you need.

So where we start is just by evaluating the profitability piece of it. What could cash management look like? And then the other aspect of having an effective strategy for managing cash is first of all, seeing it on a spreadsheet and being able to look ahead. When it feels like it’s happening to you, it’s because you don’t have any forward looking perspective — and it’s brutal for most small business owners to operate on that basis. Putting it all on a paper and designing a projection model for what cash is going to look like over the next months, three months or six months, that is very stabilizing for small business owners.

SA: Do you help folks figure out what capitalization needs to be? Like how much working capital do I need to have on hand versus what I have today?

JO: Yeah and tax is like another piece that comes into play — that’s always on the small business owners mind: what should I be setting aside for tax?

SA: Does founder/owner personality come into play? Because each owner is caring about something different or they have different risk tolerance.

JO: It’s such a common theme that when you’re accustomed to running the business with the point of view that you’re creating an output, then reverse engineering that perspective unlocks a whole lot of possibilities. I think that’s the experience that most of our clients have is: they’re thinking about how do I produce this work? How do I do it? Well, how do I make the client happy? How can I do something that looks better than my competitor, how do I maintain my artistic integrity? How do I make sure that the culture of my businesses reflects the way I want to live as a person — they’re thinking about all that stuff, you know, and I think where we can supplement everything that’s important about what I just described with saying: it’s important that you keep your eye on the ball in this segment of the business because this is going to allow you to do more of what you like to do. I think that’s the special relationship.

SA: What does it look like when it comes together?

JO: I would say the best case scenario would be for a business to graduate from having us to requiring somebody who is full time, either a controller or a full time CFO in the business. Because we work with businesses that are in this kind of early growth, maybe sort of like teenage years from a growth standpoint, revenue numbers from basically $500,000 to $5 million. So, best case scenario would be to execute on so much potential in our work together that now you’re all grown up.

The other more rewarding stuff that we see on a regular basis is people starting to incorporate a perspective that we’ve been emphasizing, on their own without our direct perspective — that’s really great.

SA: I think with a lot of founders and owners, they have those worries that keep them up at night, that are really questions or like unknowns. I like the work that you’re doing to shine a light: maybe the numbers still aren’t where you want them to be, but at least they’re visible, right? And you understand them. I think that takes a weight off of people, which I think is really comforting.

JO: Yeah. The other feeling of the owner that we strive for: the most impactful thing that they could do to drive the business is just find more work, we have everything else — if they’re feeling safe with everything that we’re handling, they can focus on work and move forward.

SA: Thank you so much Jamie for a great conversation — for more information about Aardvark’s financial work for the creative industry, including more articles and videos to level-up your knowledge, visit heyaardvark.com.

Sam Aquillano is an entrepreneur, design leader, writer, and founder of Design Museum Everywhere. This post was originally published in Sam’s twice-monthly newsletter for the creative-business-curious, Business Design School. Check out Sam’s book, Adventures in Disruption: How to Start, Survive, and Succeed as a Creative Entrepreneur.

Header photo licensed under the Unsplash+ License.

Today, I’ll apply some baseball to help explain the critical phenomenon of momentum starting with the bunt.

A bunt is a way to force a hit. A way to try to take control of the situation. A way to start some momentum.

Imagine you’re in a game. Of the 9 innings you play, you’re in the 8th with the score tied — 0-0.

You need to get out of here with a win. (Heck, it’s Cleveland in July, you really need to get out of there!)

So what’s a manager to do?

You call for a bunt.

Your player enters the Batter’s Box and assumes the bunt stance, the Pitcher pitches and voila…contact! A dribbler up the Third Base side. That lil’ shot is quite an inconvenience for the catcher who must throw off his mask, run to the ball, and try to make the throw to First.

“Safe!”

Your runner is on.

Next batter up.

Pitcher is agitated. He sets. Winds up…

And boom! Your runner takes off and steals Second!

Now you have a runner in scoring position. Now you have a chance to bring him home, score a run and subsequently have enough to hold on and win.

This, dear reader, is momentum.

Now, I purposely wrote this to give you the bunt and the steal.

Momentum, you see, is a one-two punch. You need the first bit to break the inertia. And then you need a second bit to ensure things are in motion.

Sure, the bunt was critical to break through the malaise.

But the steal is what certified the momentum.

Momentum, you see, is a one-two punch.

You need the first bit to break the inertia. And then you need a second bit to ensure things are in motion.

It’s like that song in the Christmas movie The Year Without a Santa Claus. In the stop-motion classic, the character Winter Warlock teaches Santa Claus how to walk again after ol’ Kris Kringle recovers from a nasty fall. The Warlock sings, “…Put one foot in front of the other…and soon you’ll be walking out the door!”

Step one is literally step one — but then you also need a step two. One step in front of the other to create momentum.

You might be stuck now. And I encourage you to take any first step: write the email or hire the person or take the walk with the intent to jog soon.

But as you take step one, look for step two.

What can you do next?

It’s a bunt and a steal.

It’s chess. Not checkers.

It’s the secret to making momentum.

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Photo by Colynary Media on Unsplash.

The straightforward solution seems to be a new website. Tangible engagement metrics on Google Analytics make it easier to persuade leadership to set aside funds to fix your primary channel for marketing and communications.

But, what if the root of the problem lies deeper, in the very essence of your organization’s brand?

Deciding what to invest in first should be based on the root cause of your symptoms. With several hundred projects under our belt over the last few decades, we can tell you that many nonprofits that think they have a website problem, actually have a branding problem.

Where Do Common Website Problems Stem From?

When there’s uncertainty about the organization’s direction and focus, it becomes incredibly difficult to make decisions about content organization, taxonomy, navigation, calls to action and the user experience as a whole.

Let’s zero in on one example. Web navigation is all about guiding your audience to the most essential information they need to access. If you are an org with 30 issue areas or 15 programs, showing all that in your navigation will make visitors’ eyes glaze over with decision paralysis. You have to prioritize or you risk losing people. Your choices will tell a clearer and more strategic story about your organization. But arriving at these choices is hard work.

Many website problems are rooted in strategic brand work to clarify the organization’s story and objectives.

Questions like “Who are our audiences? What is the ultimate story or impression we want them to walk away with? What are the three most important aspects of our work and approach that we want them to know?” are really brand questions that follow questions like “What makes us different from our peers? What value do we uniquely bring to this work?”

Starting your work by answering brand questions is how you make sure your website’s content strategy and user experience effectively support your organization’s mission and engage your audience.

While it’s still a little harder for nonprofits to justify investing in branding — with some still seeing “branding” as a bad word — without a solid brand strategy foundation, website projects are bound to be slow, frustrating, and expensive because no one is well equipped to make important decisions.

So you think you need a new website, but you probably need a brand. How can you uncover what you really need?

Brand-First Approach: Aligning Identity with Strategy

Being 100% real here, more often than not, clients who come to us wanting to focus on their website, with a light brand refresh attached, don’t have a solid brand strategy footing.

Think about it this way — trying to rebuild your website in these conditions is akin to asking an architect and construction firm to make you a building when you don’t yet know what the building is trying to accomplish, who it’s going to be used by, and how you want them to feel when they’re using it. Sounds like a waste of precious real estate and money, right?

If this is where your organization is, do yourself a favor, shift your resources towards building strategic alignment so you can make sure the brand authentically represents your organization. Engage your team members so they can voice ideas, understand the brand’s rationale, and its relation to the strategic plan. This will make all decisions about your website much more straightforward.

Digital-First Approach: Refreshing the Verbal and/or Visual Identity

If you have a solid brand strategy foundation, a digital redesign is a great opportunity to update your verbal identity, which might feel jargony or stale, and your visual identity, which might feel outdated or limited. A sharper verbal identity can make your brand more accessible, and a flexible, well documented design system will enable your team to communicate quickly and efficiently. These updates will all help your brand identity be an authentic reflection of your brand strategy. But the key here is that you’re refreshing your brand, not transforming it — you’re optimizing your brand identity to better reflect your strategy, not building your entire brand strategy.

There are a few important things to keep in mind when taking this approach. First, while the UX and technical implementation are a key priority for these kinds of projects, it’s important to not treat the branding part of the project as an afterthought when it comes to budget and time — make sure you give it the energy it requires and that you carve out time to have discussions about how design decisions align to the promise and personality of your organization. You should also be aware that, even though you might have a solid brand strategy in place, the concrete nature of content strategy work often reveals gaps in the clarity of your positioning which you might need to solve for.

Your Approach Should Inform Your Choice of Creative Agency Partner

Food for thought: most agencies in the social impact space are optimized for a digital-first approach to branding. Many agencies that sell digital-first branding as their primary service do so because that’s what many organizations have been comfortable buying over the last decade or so. This approach works if conditions are right, but if it isn’t what your organization actually needs, it’s not a shortcut.

Make sure that if your organization needs a brand-first approach, that you’re working with a brand-first creative agency equipped to facilitate a deeply collaborative brand strategy process with your team.

Evaluating Your Organization’s Needs

The choice between a brand-first and digital-first approach is not a one-size-fits-all decision. Both approaches, whether leading with a more in-depth branding process that sets you up for your website redesign, or leading with a website redesign that incorporates a brand refresh, require significant investment. You want to make sure you’re thoughtful in choosing the right path — the path that best aligns with your organization’s current needs and future goals.

Determining the right approach requires a reality check. Ask yourself: Is your brand clear and resonant to our staff and stakeholders? Are you able to articulate what makes you unique and indispensable to your cause?

By carefully assessing your brand’s current state and understanding the implications of each approach, you can make sure you’re using your organization’s money and time effectively and setting yourself up for success.

This essay is by Deroy Peraza, Partner at Hyperakt, a purpose-driven design and innovation studio that elevates human dignity and ignites curiosity. Originally posted in their newsletter, Insights by Hyperakt.

Header illustration by Merit Myers.

April arrives before I’m ready, every year without exception. I suppose you could argue that it’s the first of all months to truly sneak up on us with the exception of January 1, but only because we spend far too much time in advance fetishizing the harbinger of new beginnings to come on that day.

If January 1 is optimism, April 1 is a body blow to all my tender parts

April is the precise month at which we no can officially longer say “It is early in the year.”

(And yes, it is official. I declare it so.)

January brings all the hope of manifesting magical things. You will get your bills in order. You will follow up with so many friends! You will set out on a new exercise regimen. You will stop keeping cinnamon Pop-Tarts in the house. You will drink less wine and more water, get more sleep, read a book a month. You will floss. You will finally donate those bags of outgrown coats and winter boots to Goodwill. You will produce less food waste, using up every too-soft, walnut-colored, over-ripe banana in a batch of wholesome banana muffins. You will meditate. You will make the bed. You will lose your temper less and listen more. You will fix things that need fixing.

You will write.

A novel! Poetry! A Substack twice a week! Whatever it is, you will do this thing, you say to yourself on January 1.

But new habits take time to set. January gets so busy, what with all the other new habits competing for your time and attention. February is cold and short and dreary and who has the energy to do things when there’s like 14 minutes of light each day. March gets frantic with all those to-dos you need to catch up on from January and February.

And then it happens.

April.

The month you can no longer reassure yourself, “it’s early in the year! I have plenty of time!”

April doesn’t even come in quietly and considerately, gently tapping you on the shoulder while you sip your morning coffee and catch the date at the top of the NPR Up First podcast; it smacks you in the face with some godawful prank that you fall for, then laughs at you because ha, you didn’t remember it was April 1 did you.

Even if the prank was a really good one.

April is the second quarter. (Q2’24 for you business types.) April is tax month. April is oh God please tell me we’re not out of Zyrtec. April is “my kids have how long to bring up their grades before the end of the term?” April is the triceps that still look like the December triceps and just in time for strappy dress season.

For me, April is the reminder that those best-laid New Year plans and resolutions didn’t quite stick, you think as you quietly drop that squishy brown banana into the trash.

I don’t mean to sound so cynical.

April is also tulips and hyacinths, ephemeral irises, and velvety peonies. (God, I love peonies.) It’s those green-blue berry baskets at the farmers market filled with strawberries, and bundles of asparagus that don’t use up the entire $20 bill you grabbed before you ran over. It’s a high of 62 that backs you up as you try to rally the teens out of bed before noon on the weekends. April is sunlight past dinner. April is open-toed shoes, open windows, and “just a light sweater should be fine.”

It’s not the beginning of the year. I’ve missed that boat. But I this year in particular, I need it to be the beginning of something.

Something good. Stable. Hopeful.

This morning, April 1 was kind to me.

Here is one of the first things I saw as I scanned Instagram, my daily morning ritual to reassure me that the world is still here and has some beautiful things in it. (At least if you follow the right feeds.)

Morgan wrote:

Where in your life have you been holding back?
Where in your life have you been wanting to let go?
Where in your life might you be able to give energy to things you’ve been meaning to focus on?

There is no way of knowing what every day ahead will look like, but that doesn’t mean you can’t think about what good things might be possible.

You know I’m not a big fan of inspirational quotes, generally speaking. But I will always take the essential reassurance that good things are possible.

Maybe you needed this one too.

Liz Gumbinner is a Brooklyn-based writer, award-winning ad agency creative director, and OG mom blogger who was called “funny some of the time” by an enthusiastic anonymous commenter. This was originally posted on her Substack “I’m Walking Here!,” where she covers culture, media, politics, and parenting.

Header photo by Daria Gordova on Unsplash.

In my last post, I talked about typography as poetry, describing my brief exposure to commercial art through my neighbor. At the time, I mentioned my interest to some of my older friends. They discouraged me from pursuing commercial art because “it was a male-dominated field.” Today, like other professions, graphic design—formerly known as commercial art—is mainly composed of women. Data USA shows that 53.7% of American graphic designers are women.

On that note, I am sharing a small selection of the female designers I have admired. When I started in design, I did not know much. Thus, I studied others’ graphic design work and sometimes other design areas like architecture.

One of the first female designers who caught my attention was Rosemarie Tissi. I specifically remember her work for „Offset“ for the printing company A. Schöb, in 1982 (back of a folder—second image down).

I looked at the typography of this image for hours. I was fascinated with how Tissi used these big, chunky letters to create the offset printer and her use of color and negative space. In a word, I was mesmerized by how the O captures the eye and moves it from the F to the E by gradually changing the color tone and playing with size. She uses the strong horizontal the T provides to arrange the letters, making the eye move from O to T seamlessly. One still reads the word offset; nothing more is needed to understand it. Tissi takes advantage of the natural eye movement from left to right to connect the word and image in our mind organically. I was and still am fascinated.

The second female designer whose work stopped me when I saw it was April Greiman’s. I had the opportunity to see her talk in Carbondale, IL, in 2005. I have never forgotten that talk. There was a desire to search in Greiman’s narrative as she told the story of her career, which resonated with me profoundly. I wished I had talked to her afterward. Her work would leave me speechless. The elements dance in the space in almost every design she creates. I had not seen work like that when I started to study design. I remember learning the grid and alignments, but Greiman’s work turned on a lightbulb. The page becomes a stage for the performers in her work. Her ideas about how design works on a printed page influenced me the most in my perception of space, page, and type.

Jennifer Sterling has influenced the way I see and perceive typography. The typography in her work is like something that floats on the page, like a lightweight feather that moves and turns. Her work is experimental and pushes the limits of the page and even motion. We expect to see the letters moving in a certain way, but in her work, the typography can and will take unexpected turns. Sometimes, Sterling incorporates shapes and elements to enhance ideas and the typographic movement.

Architect Zaya Hadid’s work makes me look twice. She passed in 2016, and it is a loss. You should visit Hadid’s website to explore her designs. This quote from her site summarizes how I feel about her work and why I admire it:

…the beauty and virtuosity within her work is married to meaning. Her architecture is inventive, original and civic, offering generous public spaces that are clearly organized and intuitive to navigate

Zaha Hadid

Below is one of Hadid’s designs: the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. The building seems to want to levitate or fly away. It is simply impressive.

My interest in these designers stems from an admiration for defying the constraints innate to the materials they use playfully. Whether paper, digital, or spatial, these designers don’t just capture the movement in a frame; it feels like the designer is mentally dancing with their design at that moment. There is an organic and symbiotic dialogue between the design and the designer. These works are not void of meaning or purpose or are frivolously pushing the limits. These works result from a deep understanding and even acceptance of the constraints and limitations. Rather than succumbing to those, they embrace these parameters to birth work that seemingly defies its nature. Yet, it is not a rebellious defiance. It is a dance of give and take, a dance of conversation, and a dance of creation.

Of course, I can mention more designers. There are many others who have shaped the way I think about design in one way or another. However, these four designers have what I look for in my work in common: movement. When I started to study design, it was their work that captured my interest, and it still does.

Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This is an edited version of an original post on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.

Header image © Alma Hoffmann; cyanotype painted with watercolor and ink, quote from Adam Crews.

At a certain point, we all eat something memorable that we try, desperately, to duplicate. We spend hours trying to nail that one flavor. We tweak and edit and adjust and massage, just to get the correct color and consistency and general vibe. And it’s a rare occasion that we succeed.

But should we succeed? Should the Holsteiner Schnitzel I made last month really be exactly like the famous Luchow’s version that I used to share with my father in the 1970s a few years before the place closed? I’m not asking can it be—with identical ingredients and method (and skill), of course it can. But should it? How about my grandmother’s Hungarian goulash, or my Aunt Lena’s knishes, or cabbage strudel from the long-defunct Mrs. Herbst Bakery, or your southern grandmother’s fried chicken?

This is the foggy gray line—a culinary DMZ—across which sits the murky bog that comprises taste memory, emotional accuracy, cognitive ability, and desire; cross over into the mists, and you could disappear altogether, like James Earl Jones in an Iowa cornfield. He wants to know, to feel, and to experience a past so badly that he’s willing to fall, biblically, to desire, and vanish completely. Applied to the world of food and memory, if we succeed in duplicating something from long ago whose taste lodged itself deep in the recesses of our temporal cortex, does it somehow dilute the meaning—or the actual quality—of the original experience? And if we don’t succeed, does it tarnish the dish as we remember it?

When we long for the taste of a particular thing, is it the thing itself that we want, or the context in which we ate it?

A few years ago, my friend

Katherine May and I were in Maine, leading a workshop together. We were talking about comfort and discomfort, and one of the questions I asked and wanted people to think about was: when we long for the taste of a particular thing, is it the thing itself that we want, or the context in which we ate it? Is it about the person who first fed us the thing, or the place where we first ate the thing? Do we love succotash because fresh corn comes only for a fleeting moment in the middle of summer, and then it’s gone? Or pastina because it’s what our grandmothers fed us when we were ill?

One Sunday afternoon in the spring, many years ago, my friend Adriana called up and asked if I wanted to join her for lunch at a now-defunct trattoria in Greenwich Village. Perched on a corner of Carmine Street and Bleecker where Trattoria Spaghetto stood for many years (and is now 232 Bleecker), it was tiny and the sort of place that served nondescript wine out of scratched water glasses. Raised in New York City, I’d never been there, although I’d walked past it a thousand times since childhood. On that afternoon, we sat down, and for the first time in my life, I ordered soup for lunch. (We have a thing in my family about soup not being enough to constitute a proper meal, which is ridiculous.)

A bowl of green minestrone showed up, and I still have no idea what compelled me to order it. It was served with some plain semolina bread from Zito’s. It was like we stepped out of Nancy Meyers movie. The soup was delicious, the conversation was good, and then we went home—me to my small Manhattan studio apartment, and she, to her place in Carroll Gardens.

A nice bowl of soup on a Sunday afternoon. Big deal.

But for a long time, I lusted for it to the point of near-obsession. It was a ubiquitous Italian spring soup: bright green and wildly fragrant, with a combination of vegetables that included escarole, spinach, kale, and maybe some Swiss chard; there was some ditalini involved, along with a few quartered new potatoes, string beans, and cannellini. There was garlic, and probably leek. The broth was vegetable stock, and a hefty grating of Parmigiana Reggiano sat fraying on its surface, along with a drizzle of olive oil so fruity that you could smell it from across the room.

I searched everywhere but never found a recipe for it; I looked in Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed, in Ada Boni’s Italian Regional Cooking, in Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Literacy, in Paul Bertolli’s Chez Panisse Cooking, in Elizabeth David’s Italian Food. I asked my chef friends and they mostly scratched their heads when I described it. Some said it was a classic, but not with potatoes; some said the kitchen probably just had leftover potatoes kicking around; some said it was only ever correctly made with escarole (just escarole), and others said that prosciutto would never be used, not even as a condiment. It never occurred to me to just try and make it the way my brain remembered it.

I was too on the fence to attempt the dish and too wistful to try and recreate another time in my life that, with many of its people, is gone.

I was afraid that the original Proustian experience would somehow be sullied if I duplicated it perfectly, and worse still if I screwed it up: I wanted the greens to be thick and bright and fresh the way they were in the restaurant, and the garlicky vegetable broth to be fat and round. But I also wanted it to be a Sunday afternoon in the 1990s when I was in my early 30s, when I had no mortgage and no car, and I could just call up my late Dad and meet him and my stepmother for pizza at Di Fara’s in Brooklyn. I wanted it to be both the soup and the situation about which I swooned to Susan for over a decade, but withheld because I was too on the fence to attempt the dish and too wistful to try and recreate another time in my life that, with many of its people, is gone.

So why now?

Maybe it’s a combination of age and longing and being settled. Maybe it’s the knowledge that that restaurant is long gone, and so there’s no possible chance of my getting back there and saying to myself, well, mine stinks by comparison. Or maybe I’m finally okay with the idea of putting my own spin on something so iconic, even if it winds up being very different.

I never have made my Aunt Lena’s knishes, and even though I have the recipe card for it, I likely never will. Knishes are just too fraught, and Lena was a tough cookie. But conjuring up a simple, elemental meal that was perfect and idiosyncratic and served to me on an ordinary cold Sunday afternoon in the spring—that’s a risk I can take, if only for love.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.

Images courtesy of the author.

• Tesla or F-150?
• Apple or Android?
• Dunkin’ or Starbucks?

Chances are each of us will be able to make our choices pretty quickly. Even if you’re not a coffee drinker or in the market for a new vehicle, you’d probably be able to choose the one you’d be more likely to buy.

That’s because brands are becoming more deeply integrated expressions of our identities than ever before. “Brand as signal” is growing stronger all the time. There are three options on the list above that I would never even consider buying. They’re “not for me.”

You?

Probably the same. Most of us have become affiliated with brands that we experience as sharing some important traits and characteristics with our own. Over the last couple of decades we’ve become accustomed to seeing the US portrayed in this fashion.

Red states and Blue states. Of course there are people and areas within every state that vote for candidates opposite to the predominant party within that state…we call those areas “purple” zones.

Similarly, there are what might be called Red brands and Blue brands. Quick, what’s the political affiliation of the F-150 owner? How about Apple fans? I didn’t want to present beer brands, of which the now-famous Bud Light dustup is an iconic example. Too obvious.

The point is, brands see (and their employees live within) the sharp cultural divisions in America. Brands then speak to those who are most likely to desire to be identified with their cultural group preference by using a brand’s signals: language, design elements, pricing, store environments, spokespersons…all of the ways that brands communicate what their objects mean in the modern world.

Some product categories are traditionally culturally neutral; “purple.” But even those can turn deep shades of red or blue in a moment. Most of us were fairly agnostic about breakfast cereals until Kellogg ran a modified classical conditioning-rooted ad to get consumers to associate the word “dinner” with “cereal” instead of “chicken.” Sounds innocuous enough; the ad ran for almost two years without much fuss.

Then, perhaps as a function of inflation and a heightened culturally-sensitized context, people started seeing the ad as a symbol of corporate greed — “greedflation” — leading to a boycott of all Kellogg’s products. A website, “Let Them Eat Cereal” became a center for boycott information. It doesn’t take a sophisticated political analyst to speculate on the Red or Blue signals being sent there. Breakfast cereal: purple no more.

In an increasingly interconnected society, messages about group affiliation move at Internet speed. One day it’s fine to eat chicken from a fast food chain, or buy craft supplies from a big box retailer; the next day, it’s traitorous!

And, our AI tools know the score, too. I asked ChatGPT to generate images of two vehicle owners: one a Tesla, the other a Ford F-150. The results are up there at the top of this post. We’ve trained AIs on our cultural meaning structures and it will gladly feed back to us what we all already know about brands.

We attribute personality traits and lifestyle characteristics to owners of branded objects even more strongly today than we have in the past. It’s part of a bigger cultural moment, and we need to find a way out of this knee-jerk divisiveness before it leads to some even more serious consequences than stereotyping others who buy different cars, smartphones, or coffee than we do.

Tom Guarriello is a psychologist, consultant, and founding faculty member of the Masters in Branding program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He’s spent over a decade teaching psychology-based courses like The Meaning of Branded Objects, as well as leading Honors and Thesis projects. He’s spearheaded two podcasts, BrandBox and RoboPsych, the accompanying podcast for his eponymous website on the psychology of human-robot interaction. This essay was originally posted on Guarriello’s Substack, My Favorite Things.

Header photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash.

About 70 percent of Earth’s surface is covered with ocean, which accounts for about 97 percent of all the water on the planet. Of the remaining 3 percent that is freshwater, most of it is locked up in polar ice sheets or sea ice (though rapidly becoming part of the ocean), or too deep underground to be easily drawn upon. After all that, there is (proportionally) a tiny bit of freshwater on the surface or in shallow aquifers, which is available for use by people and living things. And about 20 percent of those remaining few drops are in the Great Lakes. 1 in 5 gallons of available water on earth! I find this absolutely staggering!

The Great Lakes are both precious and easy to take for granted — looking out over Lake Michigan is like (though not the same as!) looking out over the ocean. How could its resources be anything but infinite? But the Great Lakes are not an ocean, regardless of how we treat them — they are even more suggestible to human influence because they are contained.

As Dan Egan wrote in The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, about Lake Erie (the second-smallest of the Great Lakes) but could likely be written about a few (if not all) of them, “Lake Erie suffered immensely throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries as a receptacle for human, industrial and agricultural wastes. But nothing compares to what is happening today. Those millions of acres of destroyed wetlands, the overapplication of farm fertilizer, an increase in spring deluges and a lakebed smothered with invasive mussels have all conspired to create massive seasonal toxic algae blooms that are turning Erie’s water into something that seems impossible for a sea of its size: poison.”

Putting the pollution crisis aside (if such a thing is possible), as well as the invasive species question (again, hard to do), today I’m going to focus on the crazy anomalous warming this winter in the Great Lakes.

This has been a winter of extremes in the U.S., mostly fueled by one of the five strongest El Niños on record against a backdrop of overall warming. We’re experiencing historic heat in the ocean (365 days of “off-the-charts” increase in sea temperature), and on land, with the warmest January and February, coming after a year (2023) which was the warmest year ever since record-keeping began.

But in the Great Lakes, extreme barely begins to capture what has happened. Normally, by mid-March, the Great Lakes are covered in their maximum extent of ice. They’re not frozen solid across, but the ice coverage of the five lakes together reaches its normal peak of about 40 percent around now or a bit earlier. This year, the Great Lakes were about 1 percent frozen — only bays and sheltered areas had ice, and “virtually no part of the interior has ice on it,” Steve Vavrus, Wisconsin’s state climatologist and senior scientist at the Center for Climatic Research at University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me last week. Even in January, during one of this winter’s few cold-shots of Arctic air, the ice’s maximum extent only reached about half of its normal — about 20 percent.

El Niño typically blocks cold Arctic air from traveling south to the Midwest and Great Lakes region by effectively shunting the jet stream to Canada. The jet stream is the boundary, usually, between cold Arctic air and mild middle latitude air. “It was definitely surprising that there was so little cold air,” Vavrus said, “We had the standard forecast with strong El Niño, which is a mild winter, but I didn’t hear people saying this is going to be the warmest winter on record.”

Climate scientists have thought that climate change may be altering the path of the jet stream, making it wavier, periodically sending cold Arctic air farther South — this phenomenon is responsible for the “polar vortex” that sometimes swirls down into the U.S. — and Vavrus is one of the people studying this question, particularly the effects of El Niño. “When you get an El Niño that’s this strong, it can grab the steering wheel and help to dictate the winter regardless of what’s happening in the Arctic,” he said.

There are plenty of disconcerting consequences for such small amounts of lake ice coverage: water levels could be lower, since warmer water evaporates faster, which will start to happen now that it’s spring; stratification of the lakes’ layers, where colder water sinks below, could happen sooner, making the surface of the lake exceptionally warm, and it could happen sooner than usual. These are the kinds of conditions that can contribute to harmful algal blooms Dan Egan described above in Lake Erie. It will depend on the amount of runoff the lakes get, but the conditions will be ripe for algal blooms, which can be harmful to human health and fatal to animals, particularly worrisome when you remember that the Great Lakes provide drinking water for 40 million people in the U.S. and Canada. Ice cover also prevents against shoreline erosion, by buttressing the coasts from strong winter storms. A lack of ice is also possibly altering competition patterns and population dynamics between fish species.

One mild winter might make a season, but it doesn’t make a climate. However, Vavrus said, we can definitely anticipate that this is where we’re headed: “This was a sneak preview of what future winters are going to be more like, Not every winter will be this mild, but it’s trending in this direction, and there are certainly lessons to be learned.”

What are the lessons? Or more aptly, what are the questions we should now be asking? “How did ecosystems respond? How quickly did the lakes warm up? How did lake effect snow happen with no ice cover?”

“There are things we can learn and help us prepare for the future in terms of how warm it was. If I could place a bet, I’d bet for every single winter from now on that it will be warmer than the long-term average,” Vavrus said.

Something I’m interested in is the cultural effects of climate change, and what it will mean for people all over the world, and the ways that they make meaning in their lives — from traditions and rituals and stories. How might these practices shift as a warming planet scrambles the rough calendar of seasons?

The first time I spoke with Vavrus was last year, for my article about the American Birkebeiner, a cross-country ski race in Wisconsin, which I’m happy to brag about at any opportunity. Last year, I was able to compete in it and write about it (emphasis MINE; actual results less impressive) as skiers have done for decades. This year, for the 50th anniversary, the race was shortened, and instead of skiers making their way through the woods from Cable to Hayward, they competed on a 10km loop near the starting line. It was possible at all because of a recent purchase of a snow-making machine.

He seemed to feel the cultural effects of a lost winter acutely: “With all of the talk about climate change, the cultural part doesn’t get talked about enough.

“Winter is such a big part of Wisconsin culture, and we pride ourselves on being hardy,” he said. “This year, there were hardly any elements to feel hardy about. If we no longer have harsh winters, that does affect our identity as a cold-loving people.

“You can fully prepare that you’re heading into a different world or culture, but it’s not the same as really being there.”

This was originally posted on Tatiana’s Substack News from a Changing Planet, a free twice-monthly newsletter about what on Earth is happening, with articles and essays about climate change and the environment.

Header image: All five great lakes seen from a satellite in April 2004. Credit Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC.

A new piece for the New York Times, illustrating an article on brain injuries caused by blast exposure and how artillery is essentially killing members of the military who don’t even see combat. Editorial work is such a different pace to book design – turnaround of one or two days rather than several months (or even years). It’s intense, but damn I love it.

A little blown away by the virtual tour of the George Eastman Museum’s Crashing into the Sixties film poster exhibition. Properly immersive; an excellent use of 3D modelling. One of the drawbacks of viewing posters on-screen is you lose a sense of scale, but with this you really appreciate how enormous some of these pieces are.

(thank you Eric for the tip)

Elsewhere in the newslettiverse:

Owen D. Pomery on architectural drawing and the art of creating a believable space;

Marina Amaral on fake historical photos and how the increasing sophistication of AI-generated photos raises concerns about the reliability of visual evidence; and

Gia asks, what is a female robot?

Best words growled by Tom Waits in A Brief History of John Baldessari: peepholes; biennale; pushpins; Giotto; dots.

Love this detail from Frank Herbert’s wiki page:

“The novel originated when he was assigned to write a magazine article about sand dunes in the Oregon Dunes near Florence, Oregon. He got overinvolved and ended up with far more raw material than needed for an article. The article was never written, but it planted the seed that led to Dune.”

Overinvolved.

My Threads has turned into something of a monochromatic scrapbook. Not really sure why, but I like using it in a completely different way to twitter. Proper good old fashioned micro-blogging. It almost feels like – ask your grandparents – tumblr.

As a new series of Neverending Story movies is announced, behold one of the all time great cosplays.

That is all.

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Collage by the author for the New York Times.

I was socialized in a business structure modeled from the military structure my grandfather (also named Sam) operated in as an army private during WWII — one which can probably be traced back to the Roman Empire or even before. A top-down, centralized leadership approach characterizes the classic hierarchical structure. Authority and decision-making power flow from the top level (general, or in business: executive leadership) down to the lower levels (colonels, lieutenants, sergeants, privates, etc, or in business: managers, employees, etc.). This structure has clear lines of authority, with directives and decisions originating from senior management and cascading downward.

Military organizations traditionally employ strict hierarchical structures to maintain order and discipline in high-stakes, complex environments — and in these structures, orders from superiors must be followed without question. There are benefits to this approach on the battlefield. Top-level leaders make critical decisions because they (in theory) have a broad view of the strategy and goals. There’s a clear chain of command to control operations and ensure directives are followed consistently and to the letter. With that chain of command comes clear lines of authority and accountability, making it easier to assess responsibility in the event of successes or failures. And a hierarchical structure can manage very large groups of people — like an army — making it easier to organize, train, and deploy troops and resources at a massive scale.

But what happens when a soldier gets cut off from central command and realities on the ground shift? Those lower in the hierarchy usually have limited decision-making authority, which can stifle creativity when it’s needed most. Even if they do have access to central command, there are communication challenges — information may get filtered or delayed as it moves up and down the hierarchy, making quick decision-making difficult and leading to a lack of agility in the face of changing conditions and emerging opportunities.

Netflix’s Autonomous Content Teams

Business isn’t war, so let’s discuss something more fun: TV shows. Most traditional networks or studios structure their organizations in a hierarchical manner similar to the military, with top-down instructions, approvals, and accountability. Let’s bring a new show to life in the traditional network/studio model. In this scenario, we’re an in-house development team with an idea: a sitcom about six twenty-somethings living in New York City, following the hilarious misadventures of this tight-knit group as they navigate work, life, and love.

We need to pitch our concept — the premise and target audience of our show — to managers and executives up the hierarchical structure. We do pitch after pitch, incorporating feedback (hopefully refining, not watering down the idea) until we get to the decider at the top, the network executive. They also want changes, but they give it the green light, great! We develop and produce a pilot episode and screen it, again to the network executive or a team of senior executives for approval to invest and move to a full series.

This approach may have worked in the 90s when there were a handful of networks and channels developing content for a mass audience on cable television. Still, it’s not agile enough to handle the niche content tastes and changing demographics of today’s market. Netflix created a different approach that turned it into the hit machine it is today, innovating not just on how content is delivered to audiences through streaming but also on how original shows are developed and brought to the platform.

Unlike traditional studios, content decisions at Netflix are typically made by small, cross-functional teams, which have the autonomy to decide which shows and projects to pursue based on their assessment of market potential and audience preferences. These content teams rely on extensive data and analytics to inform their decisions — and have access to vast amounts of information about viewer preferences, watching habits, and content performance. This data empowers them to make informed choices about the content they believe will resonate with audiences. The autonomy of these content teams comes with a high level of responsibility. They are accountable for the success of the content they choose to produce. If a show doesn’t perform as expected, the team takes responsibility for the outcome. They also embrace an adaptive approach to content creation. If a team sees that a show isn’t gaining traction or meeting audience expectations, they have the authority to make changes, pivot, or even discontinue the project. The responsibility and authority are in the hands of the teams closest to the creative and strategic process.

An early example of Netflix’s approach to content creation through small, autonomous content teams is House of Cards. A content team at the streamer analyzed the viewing habits and preferences of its subscribers and identified a strong interest in political dramas, as well as a preference for the work of the show’s director, David Fincher. This data-backed approach, combined with the autonomy of the content team, led to the green-lighting of House of Cards.

Stranger Things is another prime example. The show was created by the Duffer Brothers, who pitched it to various networks. Netflix’s content team, having analyzed data showing strong viewer interest in ’80s nostalgia and supernatural themes, gave the green light to the show. It became a massive hit, showcasing the effectiveness of data-driven, autonomous content teams.

Responsibilization at Michelin

The idea of decentralizing decision-making and putting responsibility in the hands of those closest to the work is called Responsibilization, a term coined by the French tire company Michelin. The French word responsibilisation loosely translates to empowerment. Authors Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini chronicle Michelin’s move towards responsibilization in their 2020 book, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them.

In the mid-2000s, Michelin launched a company-wide program to improve proactivity through standardized processes, tools, dashboards, and performance audits — they called it the Michelin Manufacturing Way (MMW). And it failed. It turns out that trying to transform people into machines isn’t the best approach to creativity and continuous improvement. As MMW rolled out, leaders in the company raised concerns that the standardized approach was making it harder for local initiative and creativity to thrive. It also went against a key company value of their cofounder Édouard Michelin, who once said, “One of our principles is to give responsibility to the person who carries out a given task, because he knows a lot about it.”

Standardization efforts at Michelin yielded diminishing returns, while market dynamics demanded creativity and flexibility. In early 2012, a workshop hosted by Jean-Michel Guillon — then head of the personnel department — revealed a unanimous consensus: frontline teams needed more autonomy to drive local operations. Bertrand Ballarin, the manager of Michelin’s Shanghai plant, emerged in the workshop as a vocal advocate. With a track record of turning around underperforming factories, Ballarin believed in shared purpose, skill development, and granting production teams more freedom.

His journey toward enacting responsibilization at Michelin began with recruiting volunteer supervisors and teams willing to pioneer this new approach. Leadership asked teams two pivotal questions: “What decisions could you make without my help?” and “What problems could you solve without support staff involvement?” As Hamel and Zanini explain, workers were encouraged to initially focus on expanding their autonomy in just one or two key areas. Teams were given 11 areas to choose from and asked to document their progress through notes and videos. By March 2013, experiments gained momentum, driven by teams’ realization that they didn’t need approval and no one would stop them (what a concept!). The crew at the factory in Le Puy took on responsibilities like shift scheduling, while the team in Homberg improved internal coordination, reducing downtime substantially.

The subsequent steps saw responsibilities growing, roles evolving, and the redefinition of boundaries. Frontline employees played significant roles in safety, quality, and scheduling, with access to necessary information. They invested in enhancing skills, and managers transitioned from bosses to mentors. The initiatives brought remarkable improvements. For example, the Homburg team witnessed a 10% increase in productivity and a reduction in defects from 7% to 1.5%, with absenteeism dropping from 5% to virtually zero.

The responsibilization transformation extended beyond manufacturing, influencing the organization’s structure. In 2018, a major reorganization, developed with minimal executive input, further decentralized decision-making. The CEO declared empowerment as a new company hallmark. Michelin’s journey vividly illustrates the power of trust and empowerment. It showcases how employees, when given autonomy and support, can bring about profound changes in their roles and contribute significantly to a company’s success. Unlike typical top-down initiatives, it was built on persuasion, persistence, and a deep belief in the potential of every individual within the organization, turning ordinary jobs into avenues for personal growth and transformation.

Responsibilization at Buurtzorg

Hamel and Zanini give two more great examples of responsibilization in Humanocracy. Buurtzorg is a Dutch home healthcare organization — cofounded by Jos de Blok, who envisioned more patient-centered healthcare. De Blok, a community nurse himself, recognized the inefficiencies and frustrations within the traditional, hierarchical healthcare model. He believed in putting patients at the heart of care, and he knew that to achieve this, he needed to empower the nurses providing the care.

Buurtzorg means “neighborhood care” in Dutch. The core of their approach is simple yet revolutionary: empower self-organizing teams of nurses to take full responsibility for their patients. These teams operate independently, making decisions about patient care, scheduling, and administrative tasks collectively. The impact of this approach on Buurtzorg’s business and patient outcomes has been nothing short of remarkable. By redistributing responsibility and decision-making to the frontline nurses, Buurtzorg reduced bureaucracy and overhead costs. With a flat organizational structure and lean management, the company eliminated unnecessary administrative layers.

This lean, responsive structure not only reduced operational costs but also allowed nurses to spend more time with patients, delivering higher-quality care. The result was increased patient satisfaction and better health outcomes. The nurses could tailor their care to the specific needs of their patients, building more personal and empathetic relationships. By giving nurses autonomy, trust, and the freedom to make decisions, Buurtzorg harnessed the collective wisdom of its teams. The impact on patient outcomes was tangible, with reduced hospitalization rates and improved quality of life for those under Buurtzorg’s care.

Responsibilization at Haier

The Haier Group, a global home appliance manufacturer based in China, enacted responsibilization through its innovative use of micro-enterprises. The journey began in the early 2000s when Zhang Ruimin, Haier’s visionary CEO, realized that the company needed a radical transformation to stay competitive. Faced with global market challenges and a need for agility, Zhang introduced the concept of micro-enterprises within the company.

Micro-enterprises are small, self-managing units operating like independent startups within the larger Haier framework. These micro-enterprises are typically responsible for a specific product, market segment, or service. Instead of following traditional top-down management, Haier assigned decision-making power to these units, allowing them to operate autonomously and responsibilize their teams. One compelling example of Haier’s transformation was its approach to innovation. In a conventional hierarchical structure, innovation often gets bogged down by bureaucratic processes and siloed thinking. Haier changed the game by fostering a culture of entrepreneurship and autonomy within each micro-enterprise. For instance, Haier’s appliance design micro-enterprise was given the freedom to create and launch new products rapidly. These small teams were accountable for everything, from product concept to development and marketing. This autonomy allowed them to respond swiftly to market demands and customer feedback.

The impact on business outcomes was profound. Haier’s responsiveness and speed-to-market improved significantly. The company could introduce innovative products ahead of competitors, capturing market share and customer loyalty. Furthermore, by distributing decision-making to the teams closest to the work, Haier reduced the burden of middle management and eliminated layers of bureaucracy, streamlining the organization and making it more agile and cost-effective. Additionally, Haier introduced a “platform” approach to connect and coordinate these micro-enterprises. While individual teams had autonomy, they could collaborate and share resources through Haier’s platform. This interconnected ecosystem allowed them to leverage each other’s strengths and accelerate their growth.

Haier’s shift toward responsibilization and micro-enterprises revolutionized its business model. By 2018, the company’s revenue exceeded $40 billion, with operations in over 100 countries.

How Does Accountability Work?

You might be wondering, this is great, but how does accountability work in organizations that adopt responsibilization? Accountability is so neat and clear in a top-down hierarchy — it flows with the chain of command. But in responsibilized organizations, there is no chain of command. Responsibilization redistributes authority and responsibility to small teams, empowering them to make crucial decisions in their respective areas. While this may seem like it could lead to a lack of accountability, it’s quite the opposite.

Accountability in responsibilization is built on a foundation of transparency, shared responsibility, and continuous feedback. Small teams are entrusted with making decisions, but they are also accountable for the results. They define their own goals and objectives, which means they take ownership of their performance. This decentralized model also encourages a culture of peer accountability. Team members hold each other responsible for their actions and decisions, fostering a sense of collective ownership. The shared mission and objectives of these teams help maintain accountability, as everyone aligns towards common goals.

Regular communication and feedback loops are crucial in responsibilization. Teams continuously evaluate their performance and make adjustments as needed. This self-assessment and adaptability ensure that accountability remains at the forefront of the approach. It’s not about avoiding responsibility; it’s about taking responsibility at every level of the organization. And finally, accountability in responsibilization benefits from data and metrics. Teams monitor their progress using clear, objective indicators. This data-driven approach allows for a more accurate assessment of performance, helping to identify areas that require improvement.

How To

Implementing responsibilization in a company is a significant transformative process that involves shifting decision-making and accountability to the individuals and teams closest to the work. Here’s a very high-level approach to getting started:

• Leadership Commitment: Start with strong commitment from top leadership. Ensure leaders understand and support the shift to responsibilization. Leadership should be willing to embrace change and lead by example.
• Education and Training: Educate the entire organization about the concept of responsibilization. Conduct training sessions to help employees understand the new model, their roles, and the benefits.
• Pilot Selection: Choose specific areas or functions to pilot responsibilization. These should be manageable, well-defined areas that can serve as testing grounds for the new approach.
• Team Formation: Create self-managed teams for the selected areas. These teams should consist of individuals with the necessary skills and expertise to operate autonomously.
• Objective Setting: Define clear and measurable objectives for these teams. Ensure that everyone understands what success looks like for their respective areas. Objectives should align with the company’s overall goals.
• Empowerment: Grant the self-managed teams the autonomy to make decisions related to their work, including decision-making authority, resource allocation, and goal setting. Encourage them to take ownership of their responsibilities.
• Resource Support: Provide the necessary resources, tools, and support to help these teams achieve their objectives, which might include additional training, access to data, and any required technology or equipment.
• Feedback and Iteration: Establish a system for continuous feedback and performance evaluation. Teams should regularly assess their progress, identify areas for improvement, and make necessary adjustments. Use data-driven metrics and Key Performance Indicators to measure their performance.

Responsibilization is an ongoing process of adaptation and learning. As the pilot areas demonstrate success, consider expanding the concept to other parts of the organization. Encourage a culture of open communication, transparency, and shared responsibility to ensure its successful implementation.

Sam Aquillano is an entrepreneur, design leader, writer, and founder of Design Museum Everywhere. This post was originally published in Sam’s twice-monthly newsletter for the creative-business-curious, Business Design School. Check out Sam’s book, Adventures in Disruption: How to Start, Survive, and Succeed as a Creative Entrepreneur.

This issue of Business Design School was made possible by Aardvark. Aardvark is a financial strategy studio for the creative industry. Also known as “the fractional finance department for creative agencies,” they provide all-in-one CFO, bookkeeping, tax, cash management, payroll, invoicing, and other financial tasks needed to run a business.

Header image: Vector Mine

And what it should look like tomorrow.

We are post-Covid, semi-WFH, and multi-generational when we show up at the office.

We are scattered and fragmented when it comes to being an audience and participating in any marketplace.

We are all our own programmers on multiple platforms from YouTube to TikTok to Twitch. Our culture is no longer a “monolith” media with the likes of MTV or am/fm.

Add to that the world itself. Hardly a “Brave New World.” Rather we are living in the VUCA world — Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity

Now, who wants to get creative?!

Well, before we can cut through the Great Malaise, let’s look at a few creative company structures.

I define these as companies with a creative priority that produce a product or service.

Here are several to consider:

Imagineers: Disney

The OG ”creative department.” People and technology. Develop talent. In-house resources. High tech investment. Own the IP.

Skunk Works: Lockheed

Technology plus focused staff. “Inside-Outsider” model; meaning get inside people to work separate from the normal structure and process. Use product revenue streams to fund the R&D.

Assembly Line: Original Motown

Core staff. Talent discovery and development. Find outside talent and develop inside with mostly in-house resources. Own the IP.

Story Artisans: Pixar

Technology and people. In-house resources. Develop talent. High tech investment. Own the IP.

Writers Room: Hollywood TV (Succession, Seinfeld, Sopranos)

Human capital. Story drives all. “Dictator” model. Showrunner overlords staff. Unionized. Salary plus some IP ownership.

Production Team: Hollywood Studio

People plus technology. Focused core team at studio. Near-total outside staffing by project. Unionized. Mostly salary. Some IP ownership.

Creative Department: Madison Avenue

People plus light technology. Hierarchical. Develop in-house talent plus freelance. Salary. Fees and project revenue. No IP ownership. Limited equity.

Celebrity Creative Department: Ryan Reynold’s Maximum Effort

Celebrity talent surrounded by people and light technology. Build around the celeb. Light staff. Some freelance. Fee-revenue plus equity in clients

Art and Design Collective: MSCHF

Relatively small core team (Under 25 full-time) staff. Collaborate with outside artists and freelancers. Produce limited run products. Own the IP.

Product Lab: Xerox PARC

People plus technology. Relatively small, highly-educated and experienced “creatives.” Invent, don’t simply innovate. Think 30 years ahead. Problem-finders, rather than problem-solvers. Revenue funds experimentation.

Visionary and Vision: Ralph Lauren

Large staff. Strong understanding of brand (and boss). Chronic iteration. Own the IP.

Independent Design Studio: Italdesign

People plus technology. Augment car company and other industrial brand design departments. Combination of solving existing problems and inventing the future. Staff by project. Own some IP.

Now, as you can see, there’s no one way to do it.

What is clear is that the world is changing and it’s the perfect time to examine and interrogate how you’re working.

Do you see yourself in one of these models? Should you adopt a new one?

I’ll leave you with one final thought from writer, Bob Lefsetz. Bob was writing about the music business but this applies to any business in this particular moment.

…those who put in the effort, on both the creative and business sides, are the ones who will revolutionize this business. It’s coming. If for no other reason than it just can’t go on like this.

Bob Lefsetz

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Header image courtesy of author, created with Google Gemini.

Ten years ago I graduated from a MFA program, D-Crit, at the School of Visual Arts. I pursued the program specifically to hone my writing and critical thinking. One of the classes taught by Professor Adam Harrison Levy was called Art of the Profile. Full disclosure, my first profile was awful. That said, we all have to start somewhere, and honestly, I never stop using the lessons learned in this course. As a writing model, we studied what was and is, considered the best profile ever written.

Gay Talese’s 1966 Esquire article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is a masterclass in observation, storytelling, and painting a revealing portrait of an elusive subject. Despite never getting the one-on-one interview he was promised, Talese immerses himself in Sinatra’s world and leverages his skills as a journalist to capture the essence of Sinatra the man and the legend.

There are several key lessons today’s branding and design professionals can take from Talese’s approach:

The power of astute observation. Talese doesn’t just report the superficial facts about Sinatra—he keenly observes the smallest details of how the singer and those in his orbit behave and interact. From this, he can construct a nuanced psychological profile that gets at the core of Sinatra. For example, Talese notes: “Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.” We designers can benefit from sharpening our observational acumen, using it to better understand corporate dynamics, client needs, and issues that may only be hinted at subtly.

Showing rather than telling. Talese resists outright stating his conclusions about Sinatra’s character. Instead, he vividly depicts scenes and interactions that lead the reader to those insights. The writing follows the classic dictum “show, don’t tell.” Early in the profile, Talese paints a scene of Sinatra brooding at a bar: “Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo.”

Describing his expensive, carefully selected clothes in detail— “He wore an oxford-grey suit with a vest, a suit conservatively cut on the outside but trimmed with flamboyant silk within; his shoes, British, seemed to be shined even on the bottom of the soles.” —in contrast to his dark mood, Talese gives readers a sense of Sinatra’s inner turmoil and complexity without explicitly saying it.

Similarly, great designers know the power of vivid storytelling and examples to make a point and persuade, rather than just declaring something to be so.

Empathy for the subject. While Talese’s profile reveals some of Sinatra’s flaws, it maintains an empathetic lens, seeking to understand the singer’s complexity and motivations. Talese demonstrates empathy when describing Sinatra’s relationship with his mother Dolly, a strong-willed woman who was the closest person to him: “Dolly Sinatra was not the sort of Italian mother who could be appeased merely by a child’s obedience and good appetite. She made many demands on her son and was always very strict. She dreamed of his becoming an aviation engineer. When she discovered Bing Crosby’s pictures hanging on his bedroom walls one evening and learned that her son wished to become a singer too, she became infuriated and threw a shoe at him.” By portraying Sinatra’s childhood context and his mother’s formative influence, Talese humanizes the singer, making him more relatable and his drive to succeed more understandable.

The best branding work also demonstrates empathy, striving to understand a brand, its employees, and its customers as complete humans with real feelings, desires, and struggles. Empathy fuels more authentic, relatable brand storytelling.

Persistence and resourcefulness. Denied his interview, a lesser journalist may have given up. Talese persisted, tapping his resourcefulness to find other ways to get the story. “So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could.” Persistence in the face of obstacles and creative problem-solving are hallmarks of good design. Branding professionals need to tap their resourcefulness and think unconventionally to build multidimensional brand narratives, even when the typical tools and assets are unavailable. The path to a compelling brand is rarely straightforward.

Dedication to the craft. The depth of specificity and degree of difficulty in composing this profile speak to Talese’s painstaking commitment to his craft as a writer and reporter. From his shoe-leather reporting to his carefully constructed prose, every element demonstrates a devotion to excellence. Describing Sinatra’s cold, Talese writes: “Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. The common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.”

Designers build trust with their clients through an unwavering dedication to their craft, consistently executing their responsibilities with skill and care. This steadfast commitment to excellence is fueled by a strong work ethic and a continuous drive to hone their talents. By pouring their heart and soul into every project, designers demonstrate their reliability as partners and their ability to deliver outstanding results. Clients come to appreciate not just designers’ technical proficiencies but also their passion, integrity, and drive – qualities that form the bedrock of lasting professional relationships.

Over fifty years since its publication, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is still widely read and admired. The talents Talese demonstrates in overcoming obstacles to intimately reveal the intricacies of a cultural icon are instructive—and are ones that designers would do well to emulate. Acute observation skills, vivid storytelling, empathy for customers, creative persistence, and devotion to craft are all qualities that forge an enduring brand.

Read “behind the scenes” excerpts from Talese’s memoir, Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener, here on Air Mail.

This post was originally published on Lynda’s LinkedIn newsletter, Marketing without Jargon. Lynda leads a team at Decker Design that focuses on helping law firms build differentiated brands.

Photo by Dushawn Jovic on Unsplash.

When I returned to college I was taking classes with students who had a working knowledge of the computer and software. Some had been exposed to design in high school. My experience was different. For once, it had never occurred to me that typography could be more than a functional and utilitarian tool at the service of language. Graphic design and typography was not something I knew. Before computers, graphic design was commonly addressed as commercial art. My neighbor back home, was a commercial artist at Sears. He showed me the weekly shoppers that they’d do in the studio.

What my heart desired, was to be an architect. Though that did not work out, I could see the poetry in designing buildings, their lines in the space, the spaces with natural light, and the flow and dance of each side in its surroundings. Especially around the ocean. My grandmother was a nurse at a hospital across the street of the ocean. That contrast was remarkable to me. The sterile floors and walls against the breeze and smell of the sea made for memorable memories. But typography did not evoke any feelings for me. I knew nothing about typography.

Eventually I started to see that typography is much more than a utilitarian tool in service of language. There is an eloquence and an art to it, a finesse. And maybe even, a love affair. In many ways it is like architecture. Instead of designing buildings in the space, we design words that dance in the space. How did I come to see typography this way? It was not without its bumps and failures. I needed to be guided to learn to look, to learn to think, and to learn to design. I did not know what I needed and thus, I did not know what to ask. One instructor however, said something to me that changed my perception of typography. Her name is Cheri Ure.

My sketches and computer iterations while I was working on a type and image project back then, were less than stellar. In a critique, Cheri approached me and said:

“How would you say these words out loud if you were rehearsing to be cast in a play that you wanted really, really, bad? How would you intonate them? Where would your emphasis be? Do it alone in your house, and take note of how your tone changes and that is where the visual hierarchy is.“

Those words resonated with me profoundly. I started to repeat the words of my text over and over. I even had music going on in my mind. I started to get a hint of how typography is poetry. I started to see the words not as utilitarian tools but as something that makes an image out of meaning. It exhilarated me.

There are many aspects of typography but poetry, visual poetry has to be included as one of them. Of course, we can discuss its function. As many famous designers have stated, typography’s primary function is to make a language visible. On that note, let’s imagine all of us talking to each other in a dry, plain, matter of fact, utilitarian, and monotone voice. No changes in intonation, no changes in pitch, and no changes to express sadness or happiness. Reading in a monotone voice. Laughing in a monotone manner. Praying in a monotone state. Telling each other how much we love each other in a monotone voice. But monotone is not how we are or act, is it?

If function is all we understand about typography and it was something similar to what is on the dreaded tax forms, how dry things would be!

Typography is then more than a tool. Typography expresses the lyricism of the language, conveys the meaning of our words, communicates the love we profess for another, and visually captures meaning to make words sing, flow, fly, dance, and emote. If function is all we understand about typography and it was something similar to how is displayed on the dreaded tax forms, how dry things would be!

Typography unifies language with meaning in a tangible manner. Sometimes it can even be visceral connection elevating our words to a phenomenological experience.

To say that I have grown to love typography is an understatement. I am obsessed with it. I see letters and experience feelings, thoughts, ideas, and reactions. I see nuances that others can’t and I feel them vividly. All because the one metaphor that unlocked something in me and allowed me to see what I was not able to see before.

I will share below the before and after of the project I was working on when Cheri helped me. I keep these because they remind me that unlike color and shape, it takes a change of mind to understand typography. The text was from Luke 18. It talks about letting the children go and talk to Jesus and not to hinder them. I wanted to convey that sometimes being transparent as a child is the best way to be.

I still want to learn more typography. There is so much to learn.

The before:

And after I started to understand typography as poetry:

I learned that typographic control in the space—be it on a page, on a webpage, on an app, on a banner, or on a billboard— is essential. Much like the ballerina learns to control her poses, moves, arms, and body to move gracefully, typographic control is needed to make the words dance on the page. We learn control by studying it in a combination of observing and practicing. We learn because that is what we are wired to do. Speed is irrelevant.

Typography, well executed typography is to me the poetry we need to sprinkle our lives with. After all, typography unifies language with meaning in a tangible manner. Sometimes it can even be visceral connection elevating our words to a phenomenological experience.

Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This was originally posted on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.

All imagery © Alma Hoffmann.

In 2013, a month or so after my first book came out, I wrote to a family member with whom I had been extraordinarily close; she was on vacation on the other side of the world, but always remained in contact via text or email. A day went by; I got no response. I wrote again; I got no response. A week passed; nothing. I wrote again; no response. I thought that maybe she had been in an accident, or was ill, but there she was, all over her Facebook page, smiling broadly in the Southeast Asian sun. I wrote again; nothing. I checked my social media feeds; she was still following me, everywhere. But: nothing.

A chill crept up my spine and grabbed me by the neck.

As a young teenager, I was part of a big circle of middle school friends who moved together in a pack. We were in all the same classes, we spent our afternoons together, and when Friday night rolled around, we met at someone’s house and essentially didn’t go back to our respective homes until Sunday. I went away to camp that summer and when I came back to school in September, the phone didn’t ring. I saw everyone in class, and when the bell rang, they stood up and walked out without me. Invitations, weekends, parties, after school pizza: it was over. I didn’t know why, and when I asked one of them — the nicest one — she looked at her shoes and said I’m sorry, and walked away. Then came the crank phonecalls and the hang-ups, the nasty letters sent to my grandmother who lived across the street from me. When I saw them at school, I asked What did I do wrong? No answer. A year later, I returned to school from sleepaway camp; my stomach was in knots as I stepped into my homeroom. Everyone greeted me as though nothing had happened. I welcomed them welcoming me back into their lives—wanting me—as though I’d been on a long journey alone, schlepping through the desert of ambiguous banishment. It had been a test; I didn’t die.

The question, though, is why?

Why had they done it? Why had my family member made the decision to slice me out of her life a little more than a decade after we’d traveled to the Balkans together, hiked together, cooked together, rather than talk to me about whatever it was that was bothering her? And why did I assume — I always assumed — that it was I who had done something specific that resulted in my being ghosted?

Over the years, I have been on the receiving end of ghosting more times than I care to say or admit; it’s like there’s some sort of karmic fulfillment at play. There is no small amount of shame attached to the act of ghosting, which instantly puts the ghostee in the position of sorrowful, silent wondering and a kind of begging: What have I done wrong? What can I do to make it right? When it used to happen, I would turn myself inside out trying to unravel it, but then I wanted to know: what is the part of my personality that draws ghosters like metal to magnet? Even if I know that they have this propensity and I have been warned by others, it seems to happen again and again.

My response to it, though, is different. I want to understand who they are, why they do what they do, and how directly connected to questions of domination the act of ghosting really is.

Ghosting is a highly divisive, aggressive, even political act that sets up domination of one person over another, pits one person against another, or one group against one person for reasons that are often unclear, non-sensical, whimsical (meaning, for sport).

In 2016, three years after losing my family member to an extreme form of ghosting that involved not only her, but many other family members she tried to cajole into joining her — most of them didn’t bite; I can’t help but think that they saw what she was capable of and didn’t want to risk her ire — I began to read, and to write about it. My research was not focused, though, on current psychological studies by researchers like Kipling Williams or Brene Brown and others, but on the existence of ghosting — of ostracism, banishment, and isolation — in the most historical of terms.

The word ostracize comes from the Latinized ancient Greek for ostrakizein, meaning to publicly and legally vote to banish someone for a decade, using potshards upon which a person’s name would be scratched if they were deemed dangerous to the liberties of the people or embarrassing to the state.

The liberties of the people or embarrassing to the state. Meaning: they somehow inhibited the freedom — physical, psychological, emotional — of another. Or they caused discomfort, humiliation, or shame to The State. The State can mean anything: a family, a group of friends, a cohort.

Going back further to the times of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs, we have the story of The Azazel — The Scapegoat — who carries the burden of the Sins of the People and is sent away and into the desert to wander alone forever.

Being ghosted is the modern expression of ancient ostracism, banishment, and isolation. Ostracism, banishment, and isolation directly impact the human need for closure, belonging, support, and ritual. For sustenance.

Ghosting has its roots not in bullying, but in killing: making people go away, or sending them to the proverbial cornfield which, thanks to smart phones and social media, is as simple as tapping BLOCK.

So: Why is ghosting suddenly showing up everywhere as a topic for discussion apart from the fact that it sucks? Because all of us will go through it at some point, often more than once. Many of us will also be perpetrators of it, and some of us will only ever be on the receiving end. Ghosting is a highly divisive, aggressive, even political act that sets up domination of one person over another, pits one person against another, or one group against one person for reasons that are often unclear, non-sensical, whimsical (meaning, for sport). It has its roots not in bullying, but in killing: making people go away, or sending them to the proverbial cornfield which, thanks to smart phones and social media, is as simple as tapping BLOCK. As I wrote in a Dame Magazine essay back in 2021,

“Text-messaging has made adult ghosting far less messy, but crueler. You know when someone has read your message or when they haven’t. If they respond without a READ notification appearing after your note, it means they’ve manually disabled that notification so the person on the other end can’t tell whether they’ve seen it. Ghosting via text is like the little black purse of social snubbing: Everyone wears it, and it goes with every occasion.”

When I began writing about food and the table, it was not because I was so fanatically interested in learning how to sous vide a steak, or make a perfect Sauce Espagnole, or duplicate my grandmother’s Friday night roast chicken. I went to cooking school; I already knew how to do those things. What I wanted was to quell the visceral knowledge that I had, at times, been left in the wilderness, and that my connection to others could be as tenuous and wobbly as a rope bridge; I did this by setting my table, by putting people around it, by trying to create an environment of sustenance and nurturing rather than quiet enmity that could implode at any minute.

It will never guarantee anything, any kind of safety from ghosting for any of us — myself, my family, or anyone I feed. But it is why we come together around this Modern Tribal Fire, whether we want to admit it or not.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack.

Images courtesy of author.

• Openness to Experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
• Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
• Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
• Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/combative)
• And now, Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident).

I think of N as an unfortunately named trait because the word “neurotic” brings to mind images of unpleasant people, like the above of one of the most iconic examples of that word in modern popular culture: Woody Allen. Allen’s made a career of portraying himself as a “bundle of nerves,” living in a distressing world. Allen’s persona is filled with what might be a possible N substitute for the word Neuroticism: Negative emotionality. “Emotional stability” is another way of describing the N trait.

Negative emotionality is each individual’s characteristic “emotional temperature.” We all know someone who is (sometimes maddeningly!) unfailingly positive and upbeat. No matter what the circumstances, these low N scorers never fail to embody the Monty Python admonition; they “Always Look On The Bright Side of Life.” These are people who’d score very low on N trait scale in the Big Five Personality Test. Those who score very high (as Allen’s character presumably would) are likely to experience the following negative emotions more frequently, intensely, and persistently than those who score low.

Those “negative emotions” are:

Anxiety: A feeling of dread or uneasiness, often without an identifiable cause of source.

Anger/Hostility: Easily becomes frustrated and emotionally reactive.Fear: Intense, unpleasant reactions to specific objects, situations, or activities, sometimes out of proportion to actual danger.

Sadness: Frequent feelings of unhappiness, sorrow, or low mood, even when things are going well.

Irritability: Easily annoyed or frustrated, often over minor issues. Instability.

Guilt: Persistent feelings of sorrow, remorse, or self-blame, even if unwarranted.

Envy: Feeling resentful or unhappy about other people’s successes, possessions, or happiness.

Loneliness: Feeling isolated or disconnected from others.

Stress sensitivity: Highly reactive to modern life’s everyday difficulties.

Perceived threats: Experiencing everyday situations as more dangerous and/or threatening than they actually are.

Maladaptive coping: Uses ways of dealing with emotional distress that may provide temporary relief but are ultimately unproductive, such as avoidance or excessive worrying.

All of us have experienced all of these emotional reactions to situations in our lives. The key to understanding any of the Big Five traits is determining our normal “set point” on a five-level continuum that varies from very low to (- -) to very high (+ +). In the example of the N trait, a + + person is likely finds themselves often intensely experiencing the kinds of negative feelings described above.

But, what can we do about it?

As is so often the case with life advice, we can start with the Greeks. The exterior of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, built in the 4th century BCE, has three bits of sage wisdom carved into its facade. The first of these was KNOW THYSELF.

If you know that you are characteristically given to experiences and expressions of negative emotionality, you can take that set point into account in your daily life. And, if you’re unhappy with that tendency, you’ll need to do something different. That means you already know that saying, “I’m just reacting,” or “I’m just being myself,” or “I’m only doing what comes naturally” will likely lead to these of negative experiences.

Once we realize that this is the way we typically react, it’s hard to ignore. Many of us know the sound of that little voice in our head saying: “Ah, there I go again!” Therapists trained in Alfred Adler’s approach say that when they enable this kind of patient insight, it’s like “spitting in their soup”; somehow, doing the same things after knowing about their origins and likely outcomes is never quite “tastes” the same.

It’s akin to driving a car that with low air pressure in the left front tire: you know the car is going to pull to the left, so you have to overcorrect by slightly steering to the right. Actively adopting a positive outlook (like the Python troupe suggests) is the key. Simple? Sure. Easy? Not so much.

Each of us is an ongoing contextual, dynamic, complex constellation of the Big Five Personality Factors. Knowing ourselves means appreciating our characteristic ways of being-in-the-world and the consequences of those ways. Our lives are products of that constellation-in-action, interacting with all kinds of other people, in various situations, every day.

But, we are not completely malleable beings. Many of the ways I feel, think, and act are the result of evolution, genetics, and the environments in which I was born and have lived. That means some significant elements of our beings are immutable. Paraphrasing another another wise statement, our lives are ongoing explorations of the ways that we can accept the things about ourselves we cannot change, courageously change the things we can, and develop the wisdom to know the difference.

(P.S. – The other two wise admonitions on the Temple of Apollo: NOTHING IN EXCESS, and SURETY BRINGS RUIN.)

Tom Guarriello is a psychologist, consultant, and founding faculty member of the Masters in Branding program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He’s spent over a decade teaching psychology-based courses like The Meaning of Branded Objects, as well as leading Honors and Thesis projects. He’s spearheaded two podcasts, BrandBox and RoboPsych, the accompanying podcast for his eponymous website on the psychology of human-robot interaction. This essay was originally posted on Guarriello’s Substack, My Favorite Things.

Photo by Diane Picchiottino on Unsplash.

1 — After mentioning the Penrose Annual in last week’s Meanwhile, Alistair pointed me in the direction of Penrose 1964–73, a forthcoming book that collects the best bits from the years that Herbert Spencer was editor. Definitely one to keep an eye on, this could be stunning.

2 — Mind and eyeballs ever so slightly blown by Dune: Part Two – almost, so very almost, as good as the video game. One of these days I’m going to tackle the books, and when I do it’ll be the Folio Society’s gorgeous editions, illustrated Sam Weber by and Hilary Clarcq.

4 — “As templated tools, the proliferation of AI and the ubiquity of design tutorials make technical skills more accessible than ever, it’s simply not enough to be able to draw or design anymore. Now you need to have taste. Taste is what enables designers to navigate the vast sea of possibilities that technology and global connectivity afford, and to then select and combine these elements in ways that, ideally, result in interesting, unique work.” – Elizabeth Goodspeed on developing taste in the era of sharing, inspiration sites, and automation.

5 — Lovely video of Thomas Steinbeck on his father John’s daily stationery routine. He’d begin each morning by sharpening 24 pencils and arrange them, point up, in one box. He would write with each one until it dulled – after just three or four lines – then retire it into a second box and grab the next pencil.

6 — “A way of doing something original is by trying something so painstaking that nobody else has ever bothered with it” – Brian Eno, via Seb Emina’s Read Me newsletter.

7 — It’s happened. After years of churning out lumps of landfill pop culture, Funko have finally produced a thing that I want, I need.

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Banner photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

Design Museum Everywhere produces an annual Workplace Innovation Summit to explore the future of how and where people work. The team and I launched the first conference in 2016, which continues to this day. I’ve always loved this event because we brought so many people together around this topic; after all, we all spend about 25% of our waking hours per week at work. And especially after March 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s a critical topic with the fabric of work changing dramatically.

But transport yourself back to 2018 for a second; this is pre-pandemic. The Design Museum produced two incredible Workplace Innovation Summits in 2016 and 2017, covering various workplace topics — and now it was time to plan the third annual event. I don’t want to say we had writers-block (or whatever you call it when conference planners run out of ideas). We certainly had ideas and folks we could tap to speak at the event, but we did cover a lot in the first two conferences — we wanted to do something new and different each year, and we were stuck.

As always, we asked for help. One of our Workplace Innovation Think Tank members introduced us to Joe Mechlinski and his consulting company, SHIFT. We shared our issue with Joe and two SHIFT consultants, Liz Eskenazi and Whitney Siders. We wanted to ensure we were producing content relevant to our audience and connected deeply to their curiosity about workplace design. Their recommendation was simple: if you want to understand what your audience is curious about, ask them what questions they have about it. They advised us to use the Summit event, with hundreds of folks in attendance, for a massive Q-storming — or Question Storming— session.

Question Storming

Question Storming is a dynamic and innovative approach to problem-solving and idea generation. Like its more popular counterpart, brainstorming, question storming revolves around group collaboration to explore a topic from various angles. However, rather than generating ideas or solutions, the primary objective is to create a flood of questions — as many as possible! This technique harnesses the power of curiosity to promote critical thinking, gain deeper insights, and uncover hidden dimensions of a problem or topic.

A question is an invitation to explore and, more importantly, a signal to take action. Question storming encourages a fundamental shift in thinking. It seeks to challenge preconceived notions, assumptions, and biases that might otherwise go unexamined. Question-storming is a process that invites curiosity, the spirit of exploration, and the desire to understand better. You can apply this approach to virtually any situation, from business and innovation to education and personal growth.

Here’s how to do it and how Liz and Whitney led the session at the 2018 Workplace Innovation Summit:

1. Gather a Group: Bring a diverse group of individuals together, ideally with varied perspectives and expertise, to participate in the question-storming session. For us, it was the hundreds of attendees at the Summit, including designers, entrepreneurs, CEOs, real estate professionals, consultants, educators, and more.
2. Select a Topic: Decide on the topic or question to explore — this can be a challenge statement or a key question, which becomes the central focus of the session. At the Summit, we asked, “What questions do you have about the future of how and where we work?”’
3. Generate Questions: Time for some divergent thinking! This process allows participants to explore various dimensions of the topic; it’s not about finding the one question to rule them all; it’s about generating many questions related to the chosen topic — no restrictions! In our case, we put people in groups with Sharpies and Post-its, and folks started covering the walls with questions.
4. Do Not Answer: The key is to postpone answering the questions. Participants must refrain from attempting to answer the questions during the session — keep the focus on generating a multitude of questions instead. Not answering was hard for some folks at the Summit because they wanted to dive deep or share their thought leadership. We had facilitators in each group, ensuring the focus was on generating questions, not answering them.
5. Look for Patterns: Every individual question is important, and so are the patterns — try to group questions into categories and prioritize them for future exploration. At the end of our session, we had teams group their stickies into key themes, and each team shared their themes and questions. The questions they generated formed the foundation of our events, magazine articles, posts, and conversations on workplace innovation for years following the 2018 Summit.

Business Design Questions

I recently spoke to industrial design students at my alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology. It was a professional practice course, so we discussed careers and opportunities for designers. One of the students asked a fantastic question: “What questions would you ask if you were starting a campground business?” Gosh, I loved that question. He didn’t ask, “How would you start a campground business?” He asked what questions I would ask. I’ve never started a campground business, so I’m not sure I could say how I would do it, but I do have questions.

Let’s use his request as an example for question storming. I set a timer for 20 minutes and wrote out 60 questions relating to his key question: What questions would you ask if you were starting a campground business? Here are the first 20:

1. Who can I start this with?
2. Where should/can the campground be?
3. Can I work at a campground for six months while starting this?
4. What will I say to people when they tell me I’m crazy to do this?
5. Who are my biggest supporters/champions who can rally me when times get hard?
6. Who can I pull together to build a trusted advisory group around this idea and regularly ask for advice?
7. How can I build a community around this idea?
8. What should we call it?
9. How can I test this idea before going all in?
10. What other campgrounds or hospitality companies inspire me?
11. What value am I creating for people?
12. What does pricing look like?
13. Are there any ways I can generate annual recurring revenue?
14. Who is my ideal customer?
15. How will I reach my ideal customer?
16. Could I pre-sell stays at the campground to generate startup capital?
17. What does the ownership structure of this business look like?
18. What property/equipment must I invest in to get started?
19. What’s the ideal experience I want to generate for customers?
20. What are the insurance and liability requirements for a business like this?

I did this all in Figjam (digital whiteboard) — you can see all the questions here, along with a template for Question Storming and how I grouped the questions and prioritized the themes for next steps. It’s one of my favorite tools for quickly going from nothing to something.

The Socratic Method

Curiosity has evolutionary roots. Throughout human history, our survival and adaptation often depended on our ability to explore and understand our environment. Being curious about new resources, potential threats, and opportunities for cooperation or innovation would have conferred an advantage. The brain’s reward system also plays a critical role in curiosity. When we encounter something new or interesting, our brain releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. Our brain chemistry reinforces curiosity and motivates us to seek more information or experiences.

I love asking questions. It’s how I learn. Questions get me through the “what should I do next” moments. I even wrote a chapter about asking questions in my new book, Chapter 6: Distribute Your Ignorance. I start all my projects by asking questions and, if possible, by question-storming with a group of smarter people than me on the topic. It’s such a great way to understand people better. When you pose a question, I think people feel they must have an answer. I prefer igniting their curiosity to create space for thoughtful conversation and learning. If you ask what questions they have, they start to wonder instead. And it’s wonderful to be in a state of wonder.

In that wonder, you can generate dialogue. The Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is famous for his method of asking probing and open-ended questions, now aptly known as the Socratic method. He used this approach to engage in debates and discussions with others, encouraging them to think deeply, challenge their beliefs, and arrive at a deeper understanding of complex issues. The primary goal of Socratic questioning is to encourage individuals to arrive at their own understanding and conclusions through a series of well-crafted questions.

To help drive your next exploration for meaning and understanding through asking questions, here are some key characteristics and principles derived from Socrates’ approach:

Open-Ended Questions: Socrates believed in asking open-ended questions that couldn’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” These questions often start with phrases like “What is…?” or “How does…?” to prompt deeper exploration.

Challenging Assumptions: Socratic questioning aims to challenge and critically examine assumptions, beliefs, and opinions. It encourages individuals to question what they think they know and consider alternative viewpoints.

Exploring Definitions: Socrates often asked people to define key terms or concepts they were discussing, which helped to clarify meanings and uncover inconsistencies in their thinking.

Examining Implications: Socratic questions often delve into the consequences and implications of a person’s statements or beliefs, encouraging individuals to think through the logical outcomes of their ideas.

Encouraging Self-Reflection: The method promotes self-reflection and self-discovery. By asking questions rather than providing answers, Socrates aimed to help individuals develop a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Progressive Inquiry: Socratic questioning typically follows a structured sequence, with each question building upon the previous one. This progressive inquiry allows for a systematic exploration of a topic.

Respectful and Non-Dogmatic: Socratic questioning is a collaborative and respectful process. It doesn’t involve imposing beliefs or opinions on others but instead fosters a spirit of mutual exploration and learning.

Francis Bacon, the English philosopher and scientist renowned for his advocacy of the scientific method (another great way of questioning the world around you), once said, “A prudent question is one half of wisdom.” Next time you get stuck or are staring at a blank page trying to kickstart your business design work, try starting with questions! Gather a group and question-storm, or create a dialogue with someone using Socrates’ framework. Curiosity will always pull you forward!

Sam Aquillano is an entrepreneur, design leader, writer, and founder of Design Museum Everywhere. This post was originally published in Sam’s twice-monthly newsletter for the creative-business-curious, Business Design School. Check out Sam’s book, Adventures in Disruption: How to Start, Survive, and Succeed as a Creative Entrepreneur.

This issue of Business Design School was made possible by Aardvark. Aardvark is a financial strategy studio for the creative industry. For more info visit: heyaardvark.com​.

Banner photo © Design Museum Everywhere

That’s one thing I hear a lot as a performance and leadership coach.

“I like a lot of things.”

That’s something else I hear.

Then I hear something like this:

“I’m ready to leave my job and try production. Or media. Or TV. Or museum design. Or UX…or maybe law school.”

People are attracted to a lot things.

They often blame it on their attention spans.

I see it as Shiny Object Syndrome. A state of being in which people are attracted to one interesting thing and before they even scratch the surface of it, they jump to the next interesting thing.

Keep leaping and you won’t miss anything. Of course, you won’t catch anything either. You won’t get hooked.

It’s a form of FOMO aka “Fear of Missing Out.” The FOMO being, if you focus on one thing you can’t do another. So you keep looking at the next thing. The next distraction. And the warped logic? Keep leaping and you won’t miss anything.

Of course, you won’t catch anything either.

You won’t get hooked.

So here is my suggestion: replace FOMO with FONE.

Not your iPhone.

FONE.

F-O-N-E, as in “The Fear of Not Exploring.”

If you’re in a job and you’re ready to move, take 3-months and explore one thing.

Sure, you probably have a lot of shiny things that are catching your eye.

Why not let the shiny thing in front of you light the way forward?

But instead of a steady stream of flirting, commit to something and explore it.

Let’s say you’re in a finance job and for whatever reason Graphic Design flashes before your eye.

Before the next shiny thing starts blinking, stop here and try doing the following:

Step one: Find the origin story. Why did graphic design become a force in the world?

Step two: Learn about the icons: Paul Rand, Leila and Massimo Vignelli, Paula Scher, etc. Learn about the kinds of work they did and the problems they solved.

Step three: Focus on the current practitioners. Who’s doing great things now? Who can you follow on the socials? Who can you meet with in real life?

Step four: Take a class: Learn the skills. There are so many resources online. In fact here is a platform called Alison, which shows you hundreds of free graphic design classes.

Now if you do all of that — with real focus — one of two things will happen: You’ll find your next move. In this case, Graphic Design.

Or…it will invariably open another door. And you can start this deeper process all over again.

You see, shiny object grazing only leads to more window shopping.

Rather, get focused and go deeper. Explore one thing.

Sure, the shiny objects twinkle all around.

But why not let the shiny thing in front of you light the way forward?

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Photo by Cici Hung on Unsplash.

But that check-the-box approach to wrapping up a rebrand has mixed results: The new identity gets revealed at an organizational meeting and put out into the world on tote bags and mugs in a launch that feels like an afterthought.

Instead, nonprofits that rebrand need to develop a thoughtful, cohesive plan for introducing the brand both internally and externally. In fact, I’d suggest that you don’t have to announce the new identity with a major public-facing splash, but it should always be a big thing internally. If you don’t get your people excited when you launch the brand, you’re greatly increasing the possibility that it will fail.

Building Support & Enthusiasm for the Rebrand

Rebranding a nonprofit isn’t just a facelift. You’re telling a new story about who you are and what you stand for. It’s not just about a cool new logo or catchy tagline. It’s about getting everyone on board, rowing in the same direction, and making sure the change sticks. That’s why a well-planned rollout is so crucial: It ensures that your people navigate with you from the before times to the future. Here are some considerations as you plan the grand unveiling of the brand.

Planting the Seeds with the Right People

First things first: You need champions or ambassadors for the new brand. These are the folks who’ll spread the excitement and keep the energy high. They’re crucial for sensing the organization’s readiness for this change. Tap a few influential voices in the organization that weren’t necessarily involved in the process of building the new brand to help bring it to life.

Then there are the leaders. They need to be the voice of this rebrand and articulate the change (and the reasons for it) with confidence. They need to understand the staff’s feelings and be able to communicate the new brand effectively.

Fostering the Right Feelings

We’re talking about more than actions; it’s about emotions. You want your ambassadors to be genuinely proud of the new brand. Your leaders should exude confidence, so that the staff feels secure and enthusiastic about what’s ahead.

As you’re building excitement and anticipation, it’s important to give people the space to express their uncertainty, to ask questions, to poke at the rationale and intentions. Not only does this give them a sense of participation, it lets you prepare for the reactions that will come when you introduce the brand out in the world.

It’s also a unique opportunity to generate energy and pride within the organization. Pride is one of the most important currencies in a rebrand: When people feel pride, they’ll do more for the organization because they believe in it.

The Big Internal Reveal

The internal launch is a pivotal moment in the rebranding process. It’s when the new brand starts to become a reality for the staff. Leaders should start this phase with an event that’s memorable. It’s a chance for them to talk about why this change is vital for the future of your organization and for brand ambassadors to share the change narrative. It’s about turning the excitement up a notch – think pep rally.

Investing in a compelling launch video and some branded swag are more than just nice-to-have items. They’re essential tools that help people visualize and connect with the new brand. They help make the change relatable, tangible, real.

Living With the New Brand

Post-launch, it’s all about weaving the new brand into the fabric of your everyday work culture. This phase ensures that the rebrand isn’t just a fleeting moment but a lasting shift — your leaders and staff should feel empowered to think and act in ways that reflect the new brand.

Activities like brand roadshows and training workshops are crucial in this phase. They help your team get how the rebrand will shape day-to-day activities and long-term goals. Ongoing support is key. Brand ambassadors should be available and ready to respond to staff questions and concerns. It’s about making sure the team feels heard and supported during this transition.

Going Public

Now you’re ready to announce your new brand to the outside world. This step is all about crafting the right message for your external stakeholders and audience. Your external rollout should include a mix of messages specifically tailored to your audiences, and a carefully planned timeline. This approach ensures that your external stakeholders understand and embrace the rebranding.

The Power of a Rollout Plan

A rollout plan for a rebranding initiative isn’t just a roadmap; it’s a strategic tool that ensures all aspects of the rebranding are thoughtfully addressed — this is you taking control of your own brand so others don’t fill the vacuum for you. It involves preparing your team, engaging with stakeholders, and strategically communicating the change. Your rebranding is not just a cosmetic change but a transformation that propels your organization forward, reinforces its mission, and resonates with your stakeholders. For nonprofits, where every resource counts, a well-executed rollout is not just beneficial — it’s critical for ensuring that the new brand resonates both internally and externally.

When the brand is launched on Day One, that’s only the beginning of a full brand life cycle that lasts for five years or more. A solid rollout plan ensures that the brand achieves its full potential over that time.

This essay is by Deroy Peraza, Partner at Hyperakt, a purpose-driven design and innovation studio that elevates human dignity and ignites curiosity. Originally posted in their newsletter, Insights by Hyperakt.

Illustration by Merit Myers.

(I’m not confrontational at all, which often surprises people who know me. I’m opinionated! But not confrontational.)

For me, however, the goal of sending one hard email a week is a lot more attainable than each day and I’ve been doing it ever since.

It’s one of the most productive routines I’ve stuck with in a long time.

I suppose we could sort the “hard emails” into categories of sorts.

• The overdue personal email (perhaps in lieu of making the phone call)
• The overdue business email
• The pitching your work email
• The asking a favor email
• The fan email
• The apology email
• The tough love email
• The relationship repair email
• The email saying, “I’m sorry I can’t help you with that right now
• The email saying, “Yes I’d love to help you with that, let’s find a time.” And then you schedule it — and put it on the calendar and keep it. (Which might be the actual hard part.)
• The calling out the elephant in the room email
• The come-to-Jesus email
• The love letter

(Just don’t quit your job or break up over email. I’m old-fashioned that way.)

Just one hard email.

If not every day, maybe once a week.

Last week, for me it was the embarrassment email I’d been putting off.

And here, my face flushes just thinking about it.

Come on, don’t you have one incident you wish you could take back? Something utterly mortifying, something that still fills you with discomfort or panic; one that makes you go all red-faced and sweaty-palmed, so you bury it deep for as long as you can?

(In fact, you might have even buried one such incident until oh…say today, when some jerk writes a Substack essay asking, “Do you have one super embarrassing moment you think about a lot?” — and now here it is again.)

Embarrassment differs from shame in that shame has the essence of a moral failing. Embarrassment is the feeling of a social failing — a disconnect between the way we want to be perceived and the way we think we are perceived.

I would like to be perceived as someone who is thoughtful and says the right things the best I can. I would imagine most of us would say the same.

And so, when we fail at this… embarrassment.

Embarrassment can be a projection of your most positive traits.

Early last year, I wrote a loving and effusive Facebook remembrance honoring a friend who had passed, and posted it on the feed of their spouse. I described a wonderful memory of this friend from decades ago; something sweet and quietly admirable, something other people didn’t know that I thought they should.

The thing is, it wasn’t my friend who did these things.

It wasn’t from a period of my life that I even knew this friend.

For some reason (stress, sadness, overwhelm, momentary break from reality), I conflated multiple people from my life and fabricated an amalgam of them, thereby describing a “memory” that never existed.

In the retelling here, it may not seem like the most horribly embarrassing thing ever. And it’s not. (I mean, I didn’t accidentally attach naked photos to the post or anything.) But imagining mutual friends laughing about what the hell drugs I might be on, that I could make up a memory out of whole cloth and express it with utter confidence — that truly weighed on me, the way I’m sure some “not the worst thing ever” things weigh on you.

Last week I took a deep breath. I sent the hard email.

You know what?

I’m so glad I did.

The exchange we had was more than worth it. My friend’s spouse was gracious (again) and happy to hear from me. I was happy to have the chance to reconnect, to hear how the family was doing, to learn a little more about the friend I had lost.

I feel better.

It’s over.

And now I can put my energy toward something more positive.

I’ve always heard that we tend to judge ourselves harder than others judge us — at least if we’re not sociopaths — and one day, the piles of evidence will finally compel that lesson to stick with me.

One day.

Interestingly, I’ve learned that embarrassment can be a projection of your most positive traits. If you forget the name of your colleague’s husband at a party and feel bad about that; if you forget a birthday; if you misused a word; if the waiter says “Enjoy your burgers” and you respond, “You too!”— it’s okay. It’s more than okay. They’re not moral failings and they’re not shameful. Just embarrassing because you want to be the kind of person who says and does the right things.

It’s the not feeling embarrassed about those things that would make you a little sketch.

Maybe consider sending an embarrassment letter this week. At minimum, it will get something off your chest. At best, it will remind that person a relationship with you is one completely worth having.

Liz Gumbinner is a Brooklyn-based writer, award-winning ad agency creative director, and OG mom blogger who was called “funny some of the time” by an enthusiastic anonymous commenter. This was originally posted on her Substack “I’m Walking Here!,” where she covers culture, media, politics, and parenting.

Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash.

A selection of my students’ work is featured throughout this piece, with their permission.

I started reading Comey’s book after watching the Netflix show Comey Rule. But perhaps I should explain why this book made an impact on me. Words, arguments (not in the sense of fighting but preparing a compelling point), and rhetoric are very attractive to me. The better we can express our points, the better our eloquence, charisma, and credibility. Comey’s book does not disappoint in that sense. The writing is superb. At times, it drags, but it is generally a very well-written memoir of his time as the FBI director and how he got there. Comey worked under three Presidents: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Three different leaders with a common denominator: James Comey.

Bashing these three leaders and expanding on their weaknesses would have been easy. Comey’s measured and cautious observations of them reveal quite a bit about his integrity. Especially when he refers to Obama. Comey was a Republican appointed by George W. Bush, another Republican, as an Attorney General. Obama, a Democrat, appointed him as the FBI Director. Comey’s descriptions of Obama as a person and leader are remarkable. There is a formidable sense of respect and admiration, considering they represented different political interests. That is why I stuck with the book. If someone from an opposite party can see and speak highly of an opponent’s character (assuming there is a good character to praise), that person can reason beyond their biases. Yes, it is true that Comey was not running against Obama. Still, not many can speak about, let alone write about, the honorability of an opponent.

Civil discourse is something that we have lost in this country. I grew up in the time when a handshake was as good as any written document to seal a deal. And when your word was everything. Differences of opinion were handled with grace, for the most part. Sometimes, there were unusual and out-of-hand situations, but the norm was civility. Somehow, while growing up in Puerto Rico, that changed. Tempers flared, and voices were raised. So much so that when I came to the US, I never talked about politics with anyone. When I met my husband’s parents, I was shocked by how much they talked about politics. It took me a long time to get used to it.

There is a recollection in Comey’s book I found particularly remarkable when it came to Obama. In the chapter titled “The Washington Listen,” Comey recounts his speech in Chicago regarding the relationship between law enforcement and the African American community. Two days after the speech, Obama requested to meet with him. Inadvertently, Comey had added controversy to the controversy—to put it mildly. My read on the narrative was that Comey, like many Caucasians, was not able to fine-tune his read and feelings about the state of affairs between the police and the African American community. In Comey’s words, he “was trapped in his own perspective.” Thus, he came across differently than he might’ve wished. As an FBI director, what he said carried weight—in the context of having an African American president, the weight of how and what Comey said weighed even more. How Comey describes the conversation between himself and Obama was remarkable to me. Obama expressed he called him “to understand what you are seeing and thinking.” After carefully listening to Comey, Obama explained how the African American community perceives some of the terms and words Comey used. He credited Obama for helping him see beyond his perspective. More importantly, he remarked about Obama: “President Obama would never have considered such a conversation if he did not have enough confidence in himself to show humility.”

What made the civil discourse between Comey and Obama possible? Empathy, humility, willingness to listen, and freedom to disagree. It sounds so easy. Yet, it is so difficult. Even in the media, there is little reporting. There is, however, editorializing—words sprinkled here and there to sway opinions and kindle disgust. Both camps are guilty: the left and the right.

Now, what does this have to do with my students’ project of redesigning the dollar bills¹? Quite a bit. One of my most important goals is for my students to feel free to disagree while protecting civility. We must engage in conversations to nurture and articulate ideas that inevitably will become personal as they engage in the process of designing them. I want my students to protect each other’s space so that they can speak their views. And yes, I disagree with a good number of them sometimes. Occasionally, I have had to apologize for a word or a comment out of turn. I do not mind doing that because I am focused on a bigger goal: mutual respect, civility, and trust. More importantly, if I am willing to be vulnerable, it is very likely that my students will follow suit with their work.

When we started our project, the conversation was profound. We spoke about the nation’s politics, economy, and international practices. We discussed everything we could think regarding the United States as a nation of power. That included the good and the bad for Caucasians, Asians, African Americans, and Latinos in the class. This discussion brought many ideas and thoughts about what to highlight about the country. One design featured a plastic see-through window so everyone could see themselves in the currency when the bill was held up (see the banner picture designed by Jonathan Taylor). Others highlighted women such as Sybil Ludington, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Barbara Jordan, the first Southern African American congresswoman, and other topics important to them: marine life, national parks, the Wright brothers, and Native Americans, for instance. Their projects were so good that when I was grading them, I was filled with emotion at how much improvement they had made. This brings me back to why Comey’s book resonated with me. It is not only about people but also about how we all contribute to the larger picture: a place where diverse points of view enrich, polish, and shape each other while keeping our core values. Maybe I am idealistic. Probably so. But I hold on to it because it is worth having a class where everyone puts forth their best work based on a simple premise: it matters and makes a difference.

Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This is a slightly edited version of an essay originally posted on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.

Banner mage courtesy author, work designed by Jonathan Taylor.

1. Project is originally found on AIGA Design Teaching Resources ↩︎

What happens, though, when we go back and look at something fifty years later and it isn’t the same? Which memory do we honor? Either way, though, the memoirist is (generally) not lying nor are they committing a sin when they write about a place in a certain manner, go back and visit it, and it has or has not changed. Perception and perspective morph with the years, and they count.

What happens, though, when we go back and look at something fifty years later and it isn’t the same? Which memory do we honor?

In my experience, when we visit a place we knew as a child, that place inevitably feels much smaller: buildings now look like they belong in Disneyland, where everything is three-quarter-size, to accommodate a child’s perspective. If places don’t come to us that way — built for young eyes, bodies, and brains — then we’re automatically plunged into a sort of dream-state bigness, an outsized and vague discomfort like a size four foot clomping around in a size eight loafer. But it’s not only about place, is it; it may be that a person we remember one way was actually not that way at all. They have changed because we have also changed; we are seeing them through a gray filter of experience, making it different to locate the edges of a narrative the way we do when we’re building a jigsaw puzzle.

It used to be that memories were all we ever had to go on, and the only way we could unpack our stories and find those edges. Sometimes we corroborate our memories with others, and sometimes we use other devices — I no longer have relationships with many of the people in my family, so I go by photos, letters, diary entries — but no matter what we use, it’s all in service of one thing: getting to our truth, trusting it, honoring it. One of the other devices, whether we like it or not, is social media.

I keep thinking that there must be a word for this in Scots Gaelic, or maybe in Welsh — something like hiraeth, which has no direct English translation and means, loosely, a longing or homesickness for something that has departed. I have seen it in a few places described as a tug on the heart; it has been widely used as a meme. Something that has departed, I believe, can also mean the memory of someone who at one time made you feel one way, and then, with more information in your possession and perhaps many years of therapy, made you feel another.

I used to wonder whether this was one of the positive aspects of the early days of Facebook: we searched for and found those we loved and somehow lost to time and distance. Even now, we discover the deaths of people from whom we have drifted. With the help of the algorithm, we subconsciously taxonomize and time-stamp memory and emotion by year, place, and age. We click on MEMORIES to see what we were doing on this day last year, the year before, and the year before that. We’re reminded of birthdays that otherwise live in the fissures of our middle-aged hippocampi. We’re thrown together with grade school, middle school, high school friends we haven’t seen in forty years; we come together under the rubric of shared experience, and this is where things can get murky.

I grew up in Forest Hills, New York just outside Manhattan in the sixties and seventies; I left for college in Boston in 1981. From the day I started nursery school until the day I packed my bags for college, I went through every grade with nearly the same people. So when we all found ourselves on Facebook in 2007, my elementary school classmates — the same thirty people — posted our annual class pictures. There we were in 1969, 1970, 1972, 73, 74, 75. There were our memories, right in front of us: the time our friend Ira Elliot (now the drummer for the band Nada Surf) played Harold Hill in our sixth grade production of The Music Man. The Spring Festivals held outside in the schoolyard every late April. The teachers: our lovely fifth grade teacher, and one of the few male teachers on the staff. The first grade teacher whose Allen Ginsburg lookalike husband collected our jeans and tie-dyed them in their apartment bathtub.

Every class photo garnered long threads of comments within seconds of their posting. The girl who sat next to me — both our last names begin with A and we were both diminutive — and I were suddenly back in touch; the girl I played with in the schoolyard showed up at one of my signings for Poor Man’s Feast. Two other girls — both hilarious even as kids — engaged me in conversation. But when our fourth grade class photo was posted: silence.

Someone finally broke it: our teacher had been an unholy terror. She undermined confidence, made everyone cry as a rule, and was generally so foul-tempered that my classmates and I pleaded with our parents to let us stay home sick at least once a week. As for me, she singlehandedly destroyed any shred of confidence I might have ever had in doing math. When I saw the photo of her on Facebook, a tiny bead of sweat rolled down my back. She was vicious; I was ten years old. I had nightmares about her. She was cruel in a sort of neo-Victorian, Tom Brown’s School Days manner: cool, unsmiling, often soft-spoken, until she wasn’t. She was not an eraser-thrower or a knuckle-rapper or a collar-grabber. This teacher was a character out of a Bond movie, with heavily shellacked bottle auburn hair that would not move in a Category Four hurricane. And she terrorized me. She terrorized all of us.

Can the traumatic fifty-one-year-old school memories of a group of thirty sixty-year-olds be that radically different from the truth of who this person actually was? Could we have been wrong?

On Facebook, my classmates chimed in: she had tormented us to the degree that one of us, a successful and brilliant woman who has launched six businesses, was diagnosed with a condition called dyscalculia, attributed to the repeated trauma of psychological and intellectual violence inflicted on her by this teacher. I didn’t even know that dyscalculia existed, but when my friend told me about the diagnosis, it made sense: when I left this teacher’s class in 1973, I was not the same person I was when I started. I loathed myself; I loathed anything I might become. I couldn’t pass a mirror without turning away. She told me I was a terrible human being when I couldn’t do a complicated math problem, and for years, I believed her. She said I was an idiot; she said we were all idiots. From that point forward, I failed nearly every math class I was forced to take, from geometry in high school to statistics in college. Checkbooks still make me shudder; the simplest of household equations make me physically sick. I write these words not to elicit sympathy, but to make clear: words matter. Fallout can upend lives, and in the case of me and my class, it did.

Our schooldays in grade school were seven and a half hours long. For seven and a half hours, five days a week for a year, minus lunch, we were in this teacher’s presence. We soaked up her rage like thirty prepubescent sponges. We were changed, viscerally, and to this day, we carry her hatred of us — of all children, it would seem — wherever we go, as though it has never changed. Because, effectively, it hasn’t. In this case, our memories have not been betrayed by time and experience. They’ve been frozen in place. This is our truth.

But: social media. When we discovered that she is a centenarian grandmother and great-grandmother many times over, and we managed to find pictures of her online, we had a collective physical response. I gasped when I realized that her granddaughter was an acquaintance, a distant family friend (with a different last name). In the current photos of my former teacher, I found myself deeply concerned for the beaming children who hovered around her in the photos. Everyone looked very happy. Were they? Only they know. Do they, like their grandmother, live bifurcated lives? Was she a monster only in the confines of the school — to other people’s children — and loving and doting once she got home? Did they even know?

Can the traumatic fifty-one-year-old memories of a group of thirty sixty-year-olds be that radically different from the truth of who this person actually was? Could we have been wrong?

A few years before I left for college, a troubled guy I used to know became physically abusive to his girlfriend, my friend, at a party. I remember his attacks often taking place in public. After college, my friend said he had stalked her: he followed her from one university to another to another. Eventually, I lost touch with my friend, and my memory of him, of them, remains preserved in time. Years later, he died in a tragic accident. The hundreds of online eulogies described him as a loving, kind, doting husband and father, quite religious, one of the most generous men they ever knew, widely loved by his community.

Which was the truth? Where does memory fit in? What does it adhere to? Does who he became invalidate my memory of who he was when we were teenagers? Does the image of my former teacher surrounded by glowing children invalidate my classmates’ memories of her? Does it betray it?

Can two opposing memories be true at the same time? Are we what and who we once were, or who and what we’ve become?

In Doty’s essay, he writes:

Odd, then, to think that I’d written a memoir in which I chose not to revisit the places of the past which, unlike Nabokov, I could. I could have found the sites of childhood scenes and interviewed relatives, seeking corrections or corroboration, but that wasn’t my book’s project. What interested me was memory itself, the architectures memory constructs, the interpretive act of remembering. There is a passage in a poem by Alfred Corn which says it beautifully:

The idea hard to get in focus
is not how things
Looked but how the look felt,
then–and then, now.

Perhaps this is at the core of it all: it’s less about the seeing — the buildings that have grown smaller with time; the sight of a teacher’s face that launched a night of private messages among people who have had successful lives and children of their own — and more about the connection between memory and the feeling it elicits in the gut, and the heart, and how those feelings stay with us forever.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.

Photo by sarandy westfall on Unsplash.

Brink Lindsey has written two characteristically deep posts (here and here) in the context of his thoughts on “the permanent problem,” as well as an earlier one on the “global fertility collapse.” I could go on, but you get the idea.

These are all smart guys with good intentions. But they are also…all guys. They tend to downplay some crucial facts about the world in which women make child-bearing decisions. Men know these facts intellectually—they’ve heard the term “biological clock”—but too often don’t put two and two together.

1. Women over 35 cannot easily and safely have babies.
2. People build crucial human capital—including formal education, on-the-job skills, and professional networks and reputation—before the age of 35 and certainly before the age of 40. Men can devote these years to their careers and still easily and safely have children. Women cannot. They can only do so with the help of assisted reproductive technology, which is expensive, can be medically risky, and may not work.
3. Some careers are “greedy,” to use economist Claudia Goldin’s term. Greedy jobs are distinct from jobs that require child care during predictable work hours. They demand long hours, on-call work schedules, or frequent travel. They do not easily accommodate the demands of family life, which has its own greedy demands. Greedy jobs are often the highest paid or most prestigious in a particular field, industry, or society. For couples raising children, it’s generally the case that only one partner can successfully pursue a greedy job. The other will either take time out of work altogether when children are young or pursue a less greedy career. If both partners wish to pursue greedy jobs, they will likely not have children¹. If a woman is pursuing a greedy job and her husband a regular one, kids are also less likely.

It’s also worth noting that, among developed countries, low birth rates are highly correlated with traditional attitudes toward motherhood and family life. The single best predictor of low birth rates in Europe is the belief that pre-school children are harmed if their mother works. It’s much more important than the price of childcare. See this deep dive by Aria Babu.

To get back to the Three Basic Facts, leave aside the fraught question of finding a partner and suppose an ambitious young woman meets and marries her ideal mate by her mid-20s². Biologically she can easily have a several children. But to do so she must forgo developing vital human capital until she is in her 40s. Her male peers, meanwhile, will be building theirs. At 40, she will be the resume equivalent of, say, a 28-year-old man—but her education and skills will likely be, or be perceived as, out-of-date.

The traditional careers pursued by the mothers of the baby boom, such as teaching and nursing, are ideal for late reentry. (See my interview with Goldin.) Many others are not, including some, such as p.r., that may not even be especially greedy. The state-of-the-art moves on and, despite the law, employers often discriminate against people over 40, especially in entry-level positions. Robert De Niro vehicles notwithstanding, good luck finding an internship when you’ve been out of school for decades.

Pro-natalist policies that do not address the Three Basic Facts will be, at best, only marginally successful. Every time I read yet another article by yet another man who is ignoring these facts it makes me wonder what he was doing in his 30s.

Virginia Postrel is a writer with a particular interest in the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. Author of “The Future and Its Enemies,” “The Substance of Style,” “The Power of Glamour,” and, most recently, “The Fabric of Civilization.” This essay was originally published on Virginia’s newsletter on Substack.

Banner image: In this 1903 illustration for Collier’s titled “Race Suicide,” Charles Dana Gibson, famous for his “Gibson Girl” illustrations, tweaked the concern about falling birth rates among affluent Americans of Northern European stock. (From my collection. See The Power of Glamour for more on the Gibson Girl.)

1. This includes single-sex couples like my sisters-in-law. It’s a matter of the division of labor, not gender roles.
   
   On greedy careers, I always think of (a different!) sister-in-law, whose medical school professors encouraged her toward surgery. She said she’d like to talk to a successful woman surgeon who had a happy marriage and children. They said, “We think there’s one in Texas.” She became an anesthesiologist. (My brother, her husband, is a primary care physician.)
   
   In case you’re wondering, I have seven sisters-in-law. I have three brothers and my husband has three sisters, one of whom has a wife. ↩︎
2. For a discussion of marriage in this context, see this post by Alice Evans. ↩︎

Earlier this month, NASA launched a new satellite, PACE (which stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem), which will measure the presence, concentration, and types of phytoplankton in bodies of water around the world (as well as those other initialisms in the name) from the comfortable distance of Earth’s orbit.

Since the PACE mission only launched about 2 weeks ago, it’s not yet in information-gathering mode, but I wanted to learn more about the PACE mission and why this new data is important, so I called Jeremy Werdell, the project’s scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

He explained that this new mission will allow NASA to get a better sense of what on earth is happening, on both short and long time horizons. With aerosols, that’s air quality and what kind of pollutants might be present, especially in underserved communities without access to air quality monitoring but who might suffer from poor air quality in the short term. In the long term, it will enable scientists to understand the kind of warming or cooling effect certain aerosols might have on the planet as a whole.

For plankton, the specific communities (and their size) have implications for food security and the economy — recreational fishing, commercial fishing, tourism for beneficial species; beach closures, food and water contamination for harmful species in the day to day — and collecting that information and making it available to stakeholders might help with those economic and nutritional concerns, but also conservation efforts. In long-term analyses, we can see patterns of global carbon cycling, changing distributions and migration patterns that might accompany them.

It’s easy to forget the relevance of NASA’s experiments and data collection to our everyday lives, or why space missions and satellites really matter to us on earth. But it is because of NASA (and the efforts of other space agencies) that we know that the climate is changing; it is because of NASA that we know how it’s changing, how all of the changes interact with each other, how the climate will change going forward, and what all of those changes might mean for life on earth for future generations.

NASA, using other satellites, has previously been able to extrapolate the presence of phytoplankton from other measurements, such as the amount of chlorophyll and the water temperature, and forecast the amounts in which it is likely to occur. But PACE will be the first satellite that can detect what kind of algae is present — it’s equipped with a hyperspectral ocean color instrument, which can measure the ocean and other bodies of water across the spectrum from ultra-violet to infrared light. Scientists can then determine which communities of phytoplankton are actually present on a daily, global scale, which will be used to track changes in the ocean environment, better understand the carbon cycle, and forecast harmful algae blooms, letting fishers or other stakeholders know that it might not be save to harvest fish or shellfish from certain areas, since eating animals that have likely eaten toxic algae generally makes people sick.

The other things PACE can track — aerosols, clouds — are also really important. The uncertainty around the behavior of aerosols and how clouds form is one of the reasons why there are often such big error bars around estimates of how much warming different amounts of greenhouse gas emissions will cause. There are also lots of different sources of aerosols — emissions from volcanic eruptions, from ships burning fuel, from wildfires — and understanding which aerosols came from where, how they are behaving and interacting with each other, the atmosphere, and the ocean, will help scientists place firmer boundaries around our various warming scenarios.

All of these interactions can help explain many of the new and unusual patterns we’re seeing in global temperature swings, changes to the carbon cycle, and more. For example, extremely hot ocean temperatures this past summer had a combination of causes: global warming and El Niño, but also possibly declining amounts of sulfur dioxide aerosols from ship engines (new international regulations require ships to use cleaner fuels or scrub these harmful particles from their engines) and anomalously low amounts of Saharan dust, both of which normally reflect heat back to space, but smaller quantities of these reflective particles mean that more heat gets absorbed by the oceans. Being able to tell which part is responsible for the changes we are seeing can help make modeling better for the future, and instruct policymakers where to deploy resources.

And there are exchanges between earth and sea and sky that we also don’t fully understand, at least not on a global scale, Dr. Werdell said. “It can happen in both directions: some compounds that phytoplankton release can form cloud formation nuclei; but there’s also aerosol deposition into the ocean, which can initiate phytoplankton growth.”

After the catastrophic Australian wildfires in 2019-20, aerosols from the fires “blew to the southeast offshore to a desertlike section of ocean” Dr. Werdell said. It turned out that those aerosol deposits from the wildfires fertilized the Southern Ocean, according to a study.

“Without the vantage point of space you can’t think about how this happening globally,” he said. “It’s not like anything in the atmosphere obeys political boundaries — things go where they want. And that’s true for the ocean, plus it’s a 3-dimensional space. It’s not like land plants where you can see where they go — if you don’t see it today chances are you won’t see it again.”

Our discussion also reminded me of a book I’ve written about here before, Beyond Measure by James Vincent, about the history of measurement, but which I happen to have just reread. One of the themes that runs throughout the book is that the ways in which we understand the world — the questions we ask, the answers we get — are biased by the instruments we make that allow us to measure. We might think we know certain “facts” about how aerosols behave or how they interact with the ocean, but we may also be blinkered by the imprecision of the tools we have, and our understanding could change as a “better” tool — a more precise one, or one that measures with smaller increments — comes around. That’s not to say that there aren’t facts or physical realities, but that human subjectivity controls the measurements as well as the results, and we have to be aware that how we measure and who is doing the measuring also dictates what we measure and what we use those measurements to do.

In a chapter on the development of statistics, Vincent writes about how the improvements in measurement tools in astronomy — like the telescope — corresponded with more errors. As Vincent writes, it may seem paradoxical at first that more precision could lead to more mistakes, but:

“If you have to measure your height twenty times in quick succession, the first ten times using a tape measure marked in feet and inches, and the second ten using a laser that judges length to the millimeter, which set of results will show more consistency? It’s easy enough to hit the mark of 5 foot 10 inches ten times in a row, but measuring out 1.778 meters over and over again is a bigger challenge…this is one of the fundamental traps of measurement: the more precise you are, the more inconsistent your results often appear to be.”

Later on, he connects this to the doctrine of “fallibilism,” the idea that all knowledge is ultimately contingent, developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, “a mathematician, philosopher, and metrologist…the first to experimentally tie a unit of length to a constant of nature.” Peirce wrote, “We can never be absolutely sure of anything, nor can we with any probability ascertain the exact value of any measure.”

That’s not to suggest that it’s not worth it to measure, or to develop better instruments, to experiment and ask questions again and again. Rather, that science is always changing, which should be an exciting prospect — there’s always more to find out.

As Dr. Werdell said, “This ability for discovery” from all of the new measurements and the permutations of how to interpret them with new tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence “on top of the interconnectedness of sea and sky, this is why I wish I were a student again, because the sky’s the limit, and for the first time in my career, the pun is not intended.”

This was originally posted on Tatiana’s Substack News from a Changing Planet, a free twice-monthly newsletter about what on Earth is happening, with articles and essays about climate change and the environment.

Banner photo: Credit Joshua Stevens and Lauren Dauphin, NASA Earth Observatory.