MARKETING DIGITAL

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THE CREATIVE ISSUE

intelligence quotient

Welcome to the first issue of Interbrand IQ, an experience designed to highlight the ideas and issues that are pushing the boundaries in the art and science of branding. Through the lens of great brand thinking and action, IQ will showcase some of the world’s greatest thinkers and innovators and point you towards emerging areas of interest. We will also provide insight and guidance on the challenges of creating and managing world changing brands, to ensure longevity in the world’s dynamic and ever-evolving marketplace. This inaugural issue focuses on creativity, and seeks ideas that have the power to change the world.

In these pages, we hope to capture the inspirations, thoughts, and ideas that make great brands world changing. Whether it’s consumer electronics, financial services, or telecommunications, the brands that manage to change the way we behave, think, or experience life create a lasting impact on the world we live in. Above all, these brands use creativity and innovation to generate a spark of interest and desire which encourages us to invite them into our lives, earn our loyalty by fulfilling world changing promises, and justify a premium every time we pay for them.

We hope you enjoy Interbrand IQ, and don’t forget to visit us online at InterbrandIQ.com, where you will find videos of many of the interviews as well as significantly expanded content that we just couldn’t fit in these pages.

We welcome your feedback and hope to hear your ideas and suggestions as we continue to shape IQ into your source for brand intelligence.

Jez Frampton Global CEO Interbrand

On the cover: Interior digital rendering of the Strata Tower (under construction in Abu Dhabi), designed by Asymptote Architecture

IQ: THE CREATIVE ISSUE

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the world will change with or withouT us

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IQ ON education

sir john sorrell & lady frances sorrell

PIVOTAL

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STORYTELLERS UNITE! 12

Paola Antonelli IQ ON art

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greg clayman IQ ON media

KATSU IQ ON street art

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IQ ON youth

Jeff kinney 22

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from the editors

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Massimo Vignelli

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IQ ON DESIGN

IQ ON global citizenship

AMY STokes

hani rashid IQ ON architecture

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01.

THIS WAY FORWARD 60

brands in the key of real

brandspotting 64

Who’s Asking?

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from the editors

Ope nin gup

There are many ways to change the world. Use technology to mentor children in need a world away, or use art to blur the line between human and machine. Evolve the daily newspaper. Give schoolchildren power.

Re-imagine the very notion of what design is for, or what architecture can express. Even break the law, at great physical risk, to make your point.

But no matter who you want to engage, or what you need to subvert, there is one thing you have to do: Open up and talk to someone else.

You can converse in images or concepts, simple sentences or great structures. But the world only turns for real when we take our big ideas and share them, let them bounce around, and when we listen.

Welcome to the conversation.

Daniel Diez: Walk us through a little bit about the inspiration for IQ’s creative issue.

Chris Campbell: We’re living in a time of unprecedented change—in technology, societal structure, changes in the environment. I wanted to provide a platform to explore two areas: One, how is creativity responding to this change? And two, how is creativity driving these changes?

DD: In putting together this issue, we had the opportunity to speak with some creative luminaries across different fields: design, architecture, art; Massimo Vignelli, Paola Antonelli, Hani Rashid. Can you help us understand the connection between what we do creatively with brands and what they do in their fields?

CC: Great question. I think everyone we spoke to is all about providing experiences, and the best brands right now are providing experiences that are relevant. They are doing things in new ways that are often surprising, allowing me to engage with them in a way that has never been done before: new channels, new opportunities, new experiences.

DD: As Vignelli said: Design is design, it’s a universal principle. We can apply it to any number of things.

Chris campbell in conversation with daniel diez

CC: Correct. It lives everywhere we live. It’s part of our daily lives.

DD: Hani Rashid dives into a brand and understands its DNA. It felt very similar to how you and your team go about it. How do you create something new for a brand and marry the strategic and creative points of view?

CC: The question of creativity and strategy has been asked many times. I don’t think you can separate the two. They are actually one in the same, and I think in this issue of IQ we are going to show prime examples of that; that the strategy is creative and the creative is strategic.

DD: What led you to a creative life?

CC: I credit all my creativity to my parents who, at a very young age, bought me a box of Lego blocks.

In those days, Lego didn’t come with predetermined structures to build, no instructions. And I spent hours creating things purely from imagination.

DD: What was the most fascinating thing you built out of Legos as a kid?

CC: I used to build roller coasters, which was very challenging given Lego actually wants you to be in a rectilinear world. So I would try and bend the rules of what’s possible …

Chris Campbell is Executive Creative Director, Interbrand New York Daniel Diez is Director, Strategic Marketing, Interbrand North America

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the world will change with or without us andy payne

The world will change with us or without us.

Likewise, we can be changed by the world, or we can move to change it.

It is just such a challenge that we are facing when we think about the important role that brands play in advancing human progress the world over. Every time a brand seeks our help navigating the marketplace, we stare down these challenges anew. Because brands really are a force for change, and if we shrink from that, we are not acknowledging a fundamental truth of the world today.

Read the business news, pore over stock tables, or keep up with developments in culture and technology, and it’s clear: The way we live and do business around the world is in a state of constant flux, perhaps now more than ever. But less obvious is how these changes are altering each and every one of us in real time. As technology redefines the content of our aspirations, as healthcare undergoes repeated seismic shifts, and as media interacts with us and invites us to be the story, the ground we stand on is shifting—and it’s the companies that deliver these new possibilities who are shaping the change.

Then, too, consumers reshape these products and services in new and unexpected ways, creating a feedback loop between brand and community that is truly spinning the globe in new directions all the time.

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What connects all this upheaval—the thread running through the trends and the changes—is creativity. The scale of human creativity today is astounding, and brands provide the infrastructure, the framework, and the impetus for so much of the energy that moves the world forward. In this way, brands help define our world and serve as a filter to how we see ourselves and live our lives in relation to others.

In a word, brands are catalysts.

Brands have long been crucial change agents, creating choice, generating loyalty, and commanding a premium. But in a world where social media and high technology are enabling far-flung individuals to come together around areas of common interest and passion, brands are shaping communities, geographically decentralized groups whose alliance is undeniable and whose passion is a force to be reckoned with.

It’s a responsibility that brands can take on or shirk. Our role is to help them accept their power and use it to generate both profits and passion—the kind of passion that changes the world.

Andy Payne is Global Chief Creative Director, Interbrand

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Pivotal Maybe it happens once in a generation, maybe more often, but we usually know it when we see it: Something takes the world as it was and sends it spinning in a new direction. We asked a random assortment of Interbranders to identify just such a pivotal moment, invention, or idea.

Toyota Prius Roberto Vilchis Senior Designer, Interbrand Tokyo The events of March 11, 2011 have changed our view towards energy resources. Toyota has announced plans to install solar panels on the roof of the next generation Prius and make plugin technology standard in 2014. Toyota keeps opening paths for others to follow.

The Pill Jane Parker CEO, InterbrandHealth

Visual Diagrams Jihun Moon Managing Director, Interbrand Seoul

iPad Mary Cabrera Global Chief Talent Officer, Interbrand

Football Cassidy Morgan CEO, Central and Eastern Europe, Interbrand

For millions of women, the pill inspired individuality, role reversal, gender equality, sexual revolution, reproductive choice, women’s rights, feminism, women’s liberation, and life planning.

The visual diagram is one of the most powerful languages, regardless of region, country or culture.

In fact, it has changed the world by sharing a common tool that people around the globe can understand easily.

On a personal level, the iPad has given my son (who has autism and is non-verbal) the ability to communicate his needs and wants for an endless number of things, as well as express himself by drawing, playing the piano, learning his ABCs, and “talking” to someone whenever he wants.

Soccer, or the “real” football, is the most popular sport in the world. To play you don’t even need a ball. A rock will do, a crushed can. Anything.

Football unifies and enables. Football empowers and instills confidence. Football drives democracy and equality. Football is the world’s game, and it is world changing.

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Storytellers

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nite!

The deep past and wild future of words & pictures Peter Cenedella

“ We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

–Joan Didion

In the beginning was the word, and it was good.

There was also the image, and it too was good.

Each was good at telling stories, at doing what every one of us is forever doing with a fervor: making meaning.

But not good enough. Not for brands and marketers. Not on their own. So the wordsmiths and the designers moved in together and had a family, a family of storytellers using words and images to make meaning. And the fruits of their labors were so sweet and tempting they made more than meaning. They made desires. Whole orchards of desire took root across the land, and so the storytellers also were fruitful, and multiplied, across ad agencies, brand consultancies, and marketing firms.

Joan Didion penned her famous quote in 1967, smack dab in the cultural moment when admen and marketing mavens were discovering the power of tearing down the walls between the art studio and the copy room. It was the storytelling equivalent of splitting the atom, as the fissionable material of a few well-chosen words and just the

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right picture could lay to waste the defenses of stingy savers and purse-minders from Peoria to Peking.

Let’s look at the lab where that atom got split. Two people are pacing, sitting to draw or write, gesticulating wildly and then stopping to think. The sky outside grows dark, but their bulbs are burning.

They are wrapped up in a conversation. That conversation is a story being spun. That story, and scores of others with the same genesis, are changing the world—little by little but undeniably.

Cultural moments lasted a little longer then, and stories blew like seeds on the wind, taking time to disseminate. The powerful stories that capitalism started to weave in those artistic engine rooms blew through border crossings and under the radar, literally. We watched the dominoes fall in the battle for hearts and minds. The Me Decade. The New Age. The opening of China in the 1970s. The fall of the Berlin Wall. Powerful forces tottered like wisps once the stories emanating from Madison Avenue and Malibu became so compelling.

It wasn’t the products that people were buying.

Or, more accurately, every product was a bonus that came free with an idea. And stories are how those ideas and those products get tied together in people’s minds. Stories are the ligaments linking notions of freedom and happiness to particular products. Without stories, we are simply drinking soda or putting on a pair of shoes to protect our soft soles: so what. But add the story, and we are teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony, opening (to) happiness every time we drink a Coke. We are overcoming every negative voice in our head and the world at large to reclaim the power of our athletic bodies every time we just do it and lace up the Nikes to go for a jog.

Capitalism has endured not just because it’s a good way to get products into people’s pantries, though that’s no small feat. Capitalism feeds our appetites, but it also inspires our imaginations, sending blue jeans, Zippo lighters, and rock n’ roll through the Berlin Wall, and sending Air Jordans and hip hop into the nooks and crannies of rough streets where poor kids latched onto the dreams at the heart of the products.

The revolution will be tweeted And then one day there appeared in the land a magic box, filled with pictures and words and sounds. And it allowed everyone to talk to each other, to broadcast to the world. The conversation that started when the designers and the wordsmiths began cohabitating was no longer a hidden dialogue they had before delivering their story to a waiting world. Now the world was in the room with them. The wall separating artist from copy whiz was nothing compared to the walls that crumbled when the Internet came of age.

The first brand idea We like to use the phrase “in our DNA” a lot when referring to various attributes of organizations. It’s become a marketing mantra—and sometimes it’s even true. But what really is in our DNA is storytelling, making meaning from the raw materials of words and pictures. We’ve seen some of our forebears’ first ads, on the walls of the caves of Lascaux, in the pictograms of the Mayans and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt.

Now everybody everywhere is talking to everybody else all the time, and the sound of the world in the ear of the creative writer or artist has gone from a whisper to a scream. We need to learn to join conversations that we can’t always control.

Meanwhile storytelling has come completely unmoored from its linear structure and is now happening all around us. Audiences encounter pieces of what your brand means everywhere they turn—at the point of purchase, on a Facebook app, in a product placement, and through their Twitter feed. The stories we creatives want to tell have never had to be so consistent yet so nimble and flexible, making meaning happen across a dizzying array of traditional and new media, echoing in time and space just in time for someone to hear it, and be moved.

As creative professionals, we can align ourselves with the selling of the widget, the shifting of the unit. Or we can unify around moving ideas. It’s ideas, after all, that change the world. If you get that right, the bump in sales is the easy part.

We should strive for nothing less totally and essentially human, every time we collaborate to help create a brand.

Picture yourself huddled in the shadows, watching the images flicker in the firelight, depicting the hunt that saw the tribe through another season.

And the paintings alone could only convey so much without someone standing by the fire animating them with words, primitive though they may have been.

The words and pictures combined in that cave were not just about bone and blood. They told a story that connected the meat and the pelts—the products of the hunt—to a really profound idea: We will live, and thrive.

Peter Cenedella is Creative Copy Writing Practice Leader, Interbrand New York

This revolution in human communication and meaning-making has been brought to you by capitalism, no question. But where is it headed?

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IQ ON ART

Designs that speak to us

moMA senior Curator paola antonelli in conversation with chris campbell

N Building, Tokyo; TeradaDesign Architects, Qosmo, Inc. Media Architecture, Izumi Okayasu Lighting Design; 2009 12

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It takes an open mind to put a working subway card vending machine in an art museum exhibition. It’s just the sort of genre-expanding choice that has made Paola Antonelli, in her role as a senior curator for the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design, one of today’s most influential culture mavens. Her upcoming exhibition, Talk to Me, opening at MoMA July 24, will explore the many ways that objects, ranging from the aforementioned vending machine to a device that simulates menstruation, communicate with people. Her take on the vending machine is as simple as it is persuasive: “It’s a beautiful interface that really expresses New York City and the kind of surprising trip you are going to have when you descend downstairs.”

Chris Campbell: Paola, tell me about the inspiration behind your upcoming exhibit, Talk to Me.

Paola Antonelli: The inspiration for contemporary design shows tends to come from the way we live. Talk to Me is about how we communicate with objects. See,

objects have always been meaningful to us, even ugly heirloom things—there has always been a very strong attachment. But now we expect things to talk to us.

After the digital revolution and the post-structuralist revolution, we expect things to actually have a conversation, and if you put a child in front of an object or screen, she will start looking for switches and buttons and will start touching, trying to make the image bigger. We expect that kind of interaction. Designers have a new role. They do not only provide form and function, they have also become scriptwriters.

CC: Technology has the power to both bring people together and make people feel kind of disconnected. What role does design have in bridging that gap?

PA: Maybe because I’m so embedded in design and I believe in design so much, I always feel that technology makes people come together. Once you embrace it, it’s almost like a strange religion. What designers do best is take innovations, even disruptive ones, and make them part of our lives in a seamless way. The most classic example is the Internet.

When the Internet was born, it was all lines of code, a dark green screen and light green letters, symbols, and numbers, and in order to connect with other people you had to know how to write code. Then Marc Andreessen came and created the Mosaic interface with windows and buttons and hyperlinks, and all of a sudden you and I and my grandmother can use the Internet.

computers, was invented in 1981 at Xerox PARC, and it was intuitive and metaphorical because it presented you with a desktop, with files and folders and a calculator and a trash bin.

But you realize that the more we go on, the more these kinds of metaphors will not be necessary, because people will be able to live in the digital world without bringing with them the remnants or the reminders of the physical one.

CC: It seems that there is a role for designers who are making devices and technology more intuitive and less technological.

CC: Eventually the Internet will become like electricity, and we won’t even think about it. It’ll just be there like we turn on a light.

PA: It’s still technological—it’s just the interface that they are working on. Machines and programs have their own inner workings and then they have faces, membranes, filters between you and me, that they use to communicate with people.

You don’t really have to simplify the program—the program is extremely complex. What you try to make more intuitive, more human, more analog, is the interface. For instance, the first graphic user interface for computers, which then became the interface for Macintosh

PA: Absolutely. Every designer’s ambition is to make technology disappear, so you use it but you don’t feel that it’s there.

CC: With so much of our lives facilitated by our interactions with products, what role do you think brand plays in those relationships?

PA: It’s interesting because it’s so hard to be a brand these days. There was a moment when brands knew what they were, and it was almost like a science. You had a big manual of instructions

for how to apply the brand in every different instance—how many inches and feet, et cetera.

Now, instead, you cannot control the platform anymore. The moment of communication of the brand can happen in a totally uncontrolled manner, anywhere, and sometimes it would be better if it didn’t happen. There are so many brands that have been diluted by excessive enthusiasm by their fans. It’s so complicated that it’s better to try to bring the brand back to being a personality or a character, which is, interestingly, what happened at the very beginning of branding design.

The brands that are most successful are the brands that are able to stand alone, like human beings, in any kind of situation. Brands are almost dissolved in the identity of the object so that they can communicate by themselves.

CC: With so many hundreds of thousands of objects in the world today, and new ones coming on at an increasing rate, how do you go about selecting what is in the show?

PA: I try to really cast the net very, very wide. At the beginning of the show I pretty much tell

anyone I know, including my mom’s butcher in Milan. I just send an email saying, “I’m doing this show. It’s about the communication between people and objects. Any ideas?” And then all that goes in the big minestrone with all of this stuff that I’ve cut out from magazines, from blogs, from the research that the whole team has conducted.

With Talk to Me in particular, since it is an exhibition about communicating, we decided to have an open blog from the beginning to document our process. We posted every single suggestion as they came in and then we would try to move things from that queue into different categories if they passed the first muster. So we showed everybody how we filtered things, how organic the process is. But as usual, when you have a blog, it becomes a form of enslavement, so the last post was in November, which is a little embarrassing— but we’ve been tweeting.

CC: But there must be a lot of pressure on that final selection process.

PA: What I learned from the previous show, Design and the

“ Design is almost like a strange religion.”

Rubik’s Cube for the Blind, Konstantin Datz, 2010

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Menstruation Machine – Takashi’s Take, Sputniko!, 2010

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“ Designers have this new role— they’ve become scriptwriters.”

Elastic Mind, is that it’s okay to leave room for different conclusions, especially when it comes to contemporary design, because if you leave the theme open and the questions not completely answered, and you let people fill in the gaps and answer in their own way, the exhibition becomes more participatory and as pluralistic as any portrait of our present should be. Ultimately, I think it’s another sign of the times that you don’t necessarily have to make the ultimate exhibition about anything contemporary.

Quite the opposite, you have to pose the right questions and point people in certain directions.

CC: Can you share an example of what we might look forward to seeing at the exhibition?

PA: Sure, let’s talk about one of my very favorites, by a Japanese designer named Sputniko! with an exclamation mark at the end.

Talk to Me is about communication, the interface with the city and the world, but it’s also about trying to understand others, about diversity. This piece is

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fantastic: it’s a menstruation machine, a contraption that you can wear—it almost looks like an old-fashioned chastity belt.

As a man, a child, a husband, a transsexual, you can wear it around your waist, and it has electrodes that give you contractions, and therefore you get cramps. It also has a reservoir, and you take your own blood and put it in the reservoir, so you really go through the whole motion: you get your pain, you get all the kind of unease that goes with it and you really can feel what it means to be a woman and to have your period. It’s fantastic because it’s so poignant and so kind of scabrous—like, outrageous but also so sensitive—the ultimate form of understanding of other people.

CC: We have one more question to go along with the theme of this issue. I wonder if you can share with us something that was world changing for you?

PA: Oh yeah, I remember exactly what changed my world. As a child and adolescent I went through 15 different career

dreams, from astronaut to astrophysics—because when I got my first cavity I knew I couldn’t be an astronaut anymore—to nuclear physics to journalist, you name it. And then at some point after high school I decided to go to business school, and for two years I was really, really unhappy. Then one summer in Sardinia, I was sitting on a rock in the middle of the sea and I remember thinking, What the hell am I doing? I hate it so much. I came back to Milan and I switched from business school to architecture school without even telling my parents. Now that was a big deal because business school was private, disciplined, guaranteed of a job at the end, and architectural school at that time in Italy was a complete mess, a circle of hell. There were 15,000 students and nobody graduated and no job when you came out. My parents were not very happy, but I think it was the best decision of my life, and it’s also the only one that I remember as a decision because everything else seems to just have happened.

Top: MetroCard vending machine; Masamichi Udagawa, Sigi Moeslinger, David Reinfurt, and Kathleen Holman; 1999 Bottom: Touch-Hear (concept), Design Incubation Centre at the National University of Singapore, 2008

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iq on youth

Even a Wimpy Kid Can Change the World children’s author jeff kinney in conversation with peter cenedella

Like many of us, Jeff Kinney had a big idea hit him while he was doing a routine chore. But Kinney actually did something about it­—and how. He turned his idea into the 10-million-user-strong interactive web empire, Poptropica, which is redefining the way kids experience media and engage online. Poptropica is often their formative web experience, literally shaping their synapses, how they process information, and what they’ll learn. And then there’s the small matter of Kinney’s gamechanging Diary of a Wimpy Kid series of best-selling graphic novels that have sold over 50 million copies worldwide. His reach with the under-11 set (also known as the future) is astonishingly vast.

Yet Kinney, whose miserable junior high years serve as grist for the Wimpy Kid books, is the unassuming nice guy who downplays the significance of his work at every turn. Proving that the nerd next to you in class, the geek at a lonely lunch room table, or just the quiet kid dodging the bullies and the big egos, might turn out to be the next world changer.

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Peter Cenedella: Let’s start with Diary of a Wimpy Kid. What was the inspiration for you?

Jeff Kinney: The inspiration for me came from years of frustration trying to get my comics published and not having any success. I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist but I couldn’t break into the syndication business.

I think there was a combination of things going on. Part of it was because my work wasn’t professional grade and the other was that I was looking at a shrinking market at the time. I decided I really wanted to get my work published, so I came up with this idea that if I started writing and drawing as a kid, then the artistic merits of my work would be evaluated as if I was a child.

I thought I might have a shot if that was the case.

PC: Greg Heffley, the hero of the Wimpy Kid books, takes on a life of his own from page one. How long was he in development? Is there a bit of you in Greg?

JK: Well something that I’ve realized is that you can’t really write outside your experiences.

Even though I’m writing about a fictional family and setting, looking back on my own childhood there are similarities.

The Wimpy Kid series, five graphic novels in, has also spun off a movie and a DIY diary.

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PC: So was middle school as bleak as it got for you?

JK: (Laughs) Middle school may have been worse for me than it is for Greg Heffley. It felt, for me, like a dangerous place. We went from the safe confines of elementary school to what felt like the prison yard to me. Where I grew up it was called junior high and it was a two-year slice, which always seemed very strange to me. Elementary school was six or seven years and then high school was four years, but there was this oddity that was junior high which was only two years, and it felt like they were keeping a secret from us. My conclusion is that when you’re between elementary school and high school you’re in this larval stage and you’re swept under the rug by society so you can gestate.

PC: Some critics have compared Wimpy Kid to Catcher in the Rye because you’ve created a character who really captures a lot of the alienation that kids in real life are feeling.

JK: I probably don’t deserve that kind of comparison, but in a sense maybe Greg is a G-rated version of Holden Caulfield.

Somebody recently said that if there had been no Catcher in the Rye there would be no Diary of

a Wimpy Kid, and reading the first lines of Catcher in the Rye makes me kind of wonder if it had fallen into my subconscious to create a character with this kind of a voice.

PC: You kind of nailed it with your description of being swept under the rug by society, which Holden Caulfield felt, and which is how Greg clearly feels—under the radar. And there’s obviously a huge identification with Greg out there.

JK: Yeah, I think it’s an aspirational identification…

PC: Let’s talk a little bit about Poptropica. How did you get involved in interactive online media for kids?

JK: I had a few years of experience working on interactive design in integrated advertising for entertainment companies and CPGs at Pearson. Then one day I was mowing my lawn and thinking about where it was all headed, and I kind of got this idea that was pretty full-blown for a virtual world that would engage kids and meet them in their new literacy and also to create a more interesting experience for a client. So my first instinct was to take this

idea and leave the company and get funded. But then I realized what a great blessing it was to have such a large audience and such a good company in Pearson behind me already, so it felt like a natural thing to present the idea to the high-ups and make it happen. We were launched inside of a year and now we have about 10 million kids, which is good enough for first place in kids’ sites.

PC: Does it ever feel like an awesome responsibility on some level that you’re getting into these people’s heads at a very early stage in their lives and in their consumption of media?

JK: It is. When I go around to schools, if I ask how many people know Poptropica it’s probably 85 percent, maybe more, and then Wimpy Kid is probably 98 percent. It’s a wonderful privilege to have that saturation, and I take that responsibility very seriously.

I really believe that it is a privilege to write and create content for kids. I like the dichotomy: Wimpy Kid is pure entertainment and Poptropica is centered around learning—though not in a way that is obvious to kids. For example, we might write a story about the Loch Ness Monster or Greek mythology or even something so esoteric as the

Chicago World’s Fair in the 1800s, and we know that kids are going to be experiencing this type of content for the first time, so it’s inspiring to think that we’re creating a frame of reference that they will probably take with them for the rest of their lives.

PC: The theme of our issue is world changing creativity. Did you have any particular influence at a young age that changed you in a profound way?

JK: Well my father introduced me to comics when I was young.

He gave me lots of Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics written

by Carl Barks, and I read those from the time I was six or seven all the way up to now. I think they are the best example of storytelling I’ve ever seen, so that had to have changed me in some way.

PC: Comics have certainly had a long-term stealth impact in the world, and maybe you’re doing the same.

JK: I hope so. When I set out to write I wrote for adults, but I think that the outcome has been that my books have turned boys into readers and that makes me feel great.

For 10 million kids worldwide, Poptropica is an early exposure to everything from Greek mythology to world history.

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IQ ON DESIGN

THE TRAINED EYE NEVER TIRES Looking around with a design legend designer MASSIMO VIGNELLI in conversation with Chris Campbell

Massimo Vignelli is one who really earned it. From the start, he had to work at his obsession. And his obsession was design—in all its forms and functions. In the 1950s you couldn’t ogle centuries of architectural treasures by clicking on a couple of websites, or read Wikipedia bios of the great designers, or Google up capsule histories of the essential schools of architecture. If you were a young “architecture groupie,” as Massimo Vignelli describes his youthful self, you had to seek it out, passionately and with purpose. And so Vignelli did.

Born in Milan in 1931, his diverse apprenticeship included formal architecture training, a stint with a master glass manufacturer and furniture building—all before age 26 when a fellowship to Chicago’s Institute of Design brought him across the ocean. “Milan is a sort of machine that produces designers—dot, dot, dot, dot, like that,” he says. But he is no cookie cutter designer. His decades-long quest for new ways to meet essential human needs through smarter, more cohesive, and elegant design has changed the course of daily life for millions of people.

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Knoll package design, Massimo Vignelli, 1967

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Chris Campbell: It’s an honor to be talking to the legendary designer Massimo Vignelli.

Massimo Vignelli: You know one of the finest things in life is to leave a general façade and your name becomes legendary. It’s not Massimo, its legendary.

CC: Well you are a legend.

MV: Maybe I’m legendary because I started so early to be interested in architecture. At 16 years old I went to work in an architectural office in Milan, the office of the Castiglioni Brothers. I thought architects do buildings and that’s it, and instead I discovered that they could do anything because the premise is basically the same. They were working the whole field of design, from tableware to architecture, from interiors to exhibitions, the whole thing. So when we opened our own office, we designed all kinds of things, but always rooted in architecture—as a process, as an interest. It helps to have that common platform.

CC: What are you working on these days?

MV: Well as usual, all kinds of things, and that is what I like. We do signage, we do project design and, of course, books all the time.

We used to have a huge office and 10 years ago we scaled down. Now we work at home. We sleep upstairs and work downstairs: I get out of bed and get to my table, I get off of my table and go back to bed. It’s great commuting.

I work with a couple of associates—they share the language, the same discipline. Not that we don’t argue—arguing is very important. With Lella [Vignelli, wife and design partner], I argue all my life because you are provoked by a new project and you apply whatever you know to that particular issue, but there are always different interpretations.

It is okay, Lella and I share so much, we have so much in common. Actually, you know, in today’s language, we are not an office, we are a brand.

CC: Yes.

MV: It doesn’t matter who designs anymore—if I design, if she designs—we’re a brand. And the same is with my associates. We are all so close together, and the voice is really one, you know, and that is really what you want. I’m not interested in personal expression, I am interested in language.

I’m interested in developing a language, even for our clients, and teaching them how to speak that language. Then in whatever they do, that language will be reflected, and that is called branding.

CC: That is branding.

Richard Meier and Partners, Complete Works 1963–2008; Taschen; designed by Massimo Vignelli; 2008

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MV: And this is what we have been doing all of our life, under different names, different corporate identities—but that’s branding.

CC: You often talk about design with purpose. Which company or brand do you think is actually doing a good job of that today?

MV: I think that by far the best one ever is Apple.

To me that is the company that, better than any other one in the world, really shows how important the role of design is to the industry. Steve Jobs is the Voltaire of design, he personifies the digital Enlightenment just like Voltaire personifies the Enlightenment. He is the most enlightened person in the world in terms of companies, and not because he has a vision in an aesthetic sense, but because his vision is total. It involves the business.

Actually, every other company could be so good.

The problem is the buyers of marketing asking people. Can you imagine if Steve Jobs was asking people what they want? At the most you might get a product like Dell or any other one of those, you know, competitive companies. They believe in marketing—they ask people what they want. They shouldn’t ask, they should just give people what they need. Steve Jobs doesn’t ask, and that is why his creative marketing is successful.

Unfortunately, we are surrounded by companies who have a fear of losing their share of the market, and, therefore, they lower their pants all the time to marketing wants rather than needs. You know I live with a hope that eventually even these companies will understand the importance of branding in an ethical and philosophical sense rather than as a tool for profit, which, you know, demeans really what they are and the rest of society that supports them.

We, as professionals, have been fighting all of our lives for improvement, and we get the clients that we deserve, just like anyone gets the clients they deserve. We get very good clients: people that have vision, courage, and determination, which are the three most important things to have for a company and for a profession. You know, without that, forget it.

CC: Do you believe there is a role for research in design?

MV: Definitely. It is very important. Now, there are many ways of doing research. Research can be by lifelong, continuous interest—that is my kind. I am researching all the time. I am analyzing everything I see, and I file these feelings so whenever the time comes, I might be ready with a lot of observations about whatever it might be. Don’t miss any opportunity for thinking about what surrounds yourself.

I do not believe in that kind of research that is dominated by fear, like focus groups and research of that kind, things to justify the ineptitude of management. But the research to go in depth, for instance, to better understand a context where a product or a company or a message or a communication should be is very important.

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CC: So much of what you design touches all parts of our lives. What is the role of design in everyday life?

MV: Well I tell you, it’s one of the things I say all the time: politicians take care of nations, city planners take care of the city, architects take care of the buildings, designers take care of everything that surrounds us. Chairs, tables, glasses, cameras, everything, you name it, is designed by a designer.

It is the most pervasive profession; in a sense the most antique as well, when you think about it. The cave man was the first designer. Can you imagine when he came home and invented the wheel? Like a Flintstone. That person was a designer, not an architect or an engineer. He just dropped this thing and said, “Look at that. Isn’t that great? When it’s flat you can make a table. If you put it up, you can roll it. If you put two together, you begin to have a cart.” He was a designer, you know?

everyone was adding, adding things. You do something then you add a decoration on top and then you add this and you add that, and Mies, instead, just worked by subtracting and subtracting until you can’t take out any more.

When I was young it was incredible just to learn the relationship of the walls. It was so exciting to put a wall here and a wall there and a gap in between— the tension becomes the new language of elements.

The tension is one of the things that we talk about all the time: margins on the book that have tension and otherwise they look like flat tires, and most of the time no one pays attention to that. Everyone thinks that typography is the typeface; typography is not a typeface. Typography is the relationship between the white spaces, what is not printed. What is printed is nothing. When you draw lines, that is not type, but the structure is there and that is typography.

CC: Yes, yes. Well, I just have one final question.

MV: It’s too bad, I like it. Keep going.

CC: The theme of the issue is the idea of world changing creativity. What person, place, or thing changed your world?

MV: I think the person that had the biggest influence on my life was Mies van der Rohe, who I met in Chicago. For me it was incredible to discover that the creative process could be done by subtraction instead of addition. You know

New York City Subway Diagram, Massimo Vignelli with associates Beatriz Cifuentes and Yoshiki Waterhouse, 2008 26

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So the process is to work by subtraction. That was the most important lesson in my life, and, of course, there were many others. When you live as long as I have so far, and when you have the passion, you keep finding things that are exciting, because the eye is more trained to look at things, so it never tires. Everything becomes stimulating.

I tell you, if you don’t like design, just do something else, but don’t mess up with design.

Heller Compact Stacking Dinnerware, Massimo Vignelli, 1964

A Few Basic Typefaces exhibition poster, Massimo Vignelli, 1991

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IQ ON education

Designing Children Designers Sir John Sorrell and Lady Frances Sorrell in conversation with Andy Payne

The Sorrell Foundation teaches schoolchildren as young as five how to develop their own creative briefs for designers and architects.

The past 35 years in Britain have seen a revolution in the visual arts. The cultural ferment that has attended the rise of the Tate and the emergence of world-changing artists like Damien Hirst has also had a commercial design counterpart in the husband-and-wife team of Sir John and Lady Frances Sorrell. The Sorrells launched their nowlegendary agency, Newell and Sorrell, in 1976. They are behind the groundbreaking redesigns of many of the U.K.’s most renowned organizations, including British Airways, the BBC, and the Royal Mail.

In 1999, they established the Sorrell Foundation to help inspire creativity in schoolchildren throughout Britain by teaching the importance of good design—often from the client’s perspective.

Andy Payne: What is the goal of the Sorrell Foundation?

Sir John Sorrell: Well, it says on paper, the aim of the Sorrell Foundation is to inspire creativity in young people and to improve quality of life through design. It was 11 years ago when we wrote that. That hasn’t changed, but what’s been added now is to help young people get on the pathway to studying art and/or design and then getting careers in the creative industries.

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Lady Frances Sorrell: Some of the young people from our earlier projects, who are now in their twenties, got inspired by working with fabulous architects and went on to do things like structural engineering at Cambridge. And then we’ve helped them get placements with good architectural practices, and these relationships have gone on.

What we’ve discovered in the early years is being fed on to the next generation.

AP: What led to the founding of the Sorrell Foundation?

JS: A long time ago, we were being asked to do free work for schools and we did this for 20 years on and off. And we became quite familiar with the way schools work. We got to the point where we felt slightly uncomfortable about the way we would set a project, the kids would do some work, you would put it on the walls, and everyone would say, “great,” and you would go away. We didn’t think that was right for the kids, so we had the idea of a role reversal. Instead of going into schools to set projects for the kids to do, we decided to go into schools and ask the kids to set the brief for a design project that would improve quality of life in the school for everybody. Once they created a brief, which we helped them with, we would assign a designer to

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work for them, literally, like a client team in any organization in the world—except this time they might be as young as five or six, or 12 to 14.

FS: It worked for every child, but there were marked improvements in the disaffected kids.

That was all through being responsible, through managing the project. The fascinating thing is, as soon as they had to represent the school, instead of rubbishing it, they would talk it up, so that was absolutely delightful.

JS: One of the tricks is to make the kids informed and inspired clients. For example, if they want to re-do their school canteen, they probably haven’t been to many restaurants, so they’ve got no reference points in the conversation with the designer.

But of course school food is the fastest fast food in the world, so you go to fast food restaurants, and the kids talk to the manager. They take photographs. They film it. They ask questions. They find out how it all works. They talk to the staff, the customers, and in the end, they’re experts on fast food restaurants, and they can engage in a conversation with their architects or designers.

FS: So you’re sitting in a restaurant, and they’re looking around realizing that everything around them has been designed. They’re starting to develop their own critical awareness and they are starting to realize if something doesn’t work or if they really don’t like it. It enhances their whole life, because suddenly they are seeing things.

AP: What’s your main inspiration for doing this work?

JS: What we’re really interested in is what the young people are getting out of this engagement, which is really three things. First, we’re interested in developing their critical appreciation of design. Second, they’re all consumers of design, so helping them to be better consumers and more aware consumers, I think, is very important. The third thing is that some of them will be clients of designers, and we always say that the best work is when you have a great relationship between the client and the designer.

AP: Is it important to you to be able to share your passion for design?

FS: Working in our own practice, you just realize that design touches everything. It absolutely touches everything. But working in the Foundation, the excitement has been seeing that moment of realization with young people when they suddenly find what it is they want to do. And that’s the thing—that’s the magical bit.

JS: Absolutely everything made by human beings is designed by someone. So we think a world where there is much better design is bound to be a better world. I think the earlier you start to notice design and see what a difference it can make in your life— whether it’s good or bad—the better.

AP: Where do you see the Sorrell Foundation in the future?

Sir John Sorrell and Lady Frances Sorrell: “We think a world where there is better design is bound to be a better world.”

JS: We’ve developed an extraordinary amount of knowledge about the way young people use design in their lives, and over the last few years we’ve been approached by quite a few organizations who’d like to access it, especially researchers looking at the way young people behave and think. So right now we are working on how to do that. The other two things we see for the future are, first of all, the National Art and Design Saturday Club, a grand Gilbert and Sullivan title for something which is actually very simple: We are reviving the idea of Saturday morning classes for 14- to 16-year-olds.

We’ve given it this grand name to give it a serious, national image, and as of today we have 14 colleges and universities providing classes in different parts of the country.

FS: About 400 kids at the moment are involved.

JS: If we can get a critical mass of people joining this initiative, there could be several thousand kids every Saturday morning benefiting.

FS: And the other one is Design Club, which is this idea of an in-school club for design. The students watch a film about a specific piece of design, whether it’s fashion or a piece of furniture or a car, and they understand the whole process. They understand about how the design was conceived, how the product is made. They can then debate it.

They can do a criticism of the design, whether they like it or not, and then they submit it.

JS: So what we hope to see is a kind of legacy from the work we’ve done, which is happening in different ways and in different places.

AP: For those who are seeking creativity in their lives, where should they go for inspiration?

JS: I think exposure to great art is something that is absolutely inspiring and enriching and rewarding for anybody. If you’re in the design world, it feeds understanding and knowledge and the ability to create great design. It’s great to see these kids standing in front of art, and they come and say to us, “I’ve just seen this amazing painting.”

FS: It’s actually very true though, when you’re creating a brand or an identity or you’re creating a design for a client, the first thing you do is look for reference points. You try to find inspiration. You open art books. You go and see an exhibition. You try to find something that will trigger an idea, and I think it’s the same for young people when they’re starting off: They’re like blotting paper, you dip them in as much as you possibly can and let them soak up whatever might inspire them.

AP: What do you hope the lasting effect of the Sorrell Foundation will be?

FS: Just to inspire some kids. That’s it.

JS: Yeah, that’ll do.

By working on creative briefs the kids are awakened to the world of design: “It enhances their whole life, because suddenly they are seeing things.”

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IQ ON media

neW media pioneers

Digital publisher GREG CLAYMAN in conversation with JEFF MANCINI

Does it feel like a new day rising every time you power up your iPad, as bright and promising as the early days of the PC revolution? It should.

We are only beginning to come to grips with the unexplored frontiers of content delivery the iPad opens up. And charging headlong into the future is News Corp.’s The Daily—the first iPadspecific daily publication. Like frontiers past, this one is likely to go all Wild West before settling, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that Rupert Murdoch’s troops are planting their flag and setting up the first tricked-out fort on the horizon.

We caught up with The Daily’s publisher, Greg Clayman, and asked him to help us map this world-changing terrain.

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Twenty-four hours after Elizabeth Taylor passed away, The Daily published an 80-page tribute to the legendary star.

Jeff Mancini: What was the creative spark, the inspiration behind The Daily?

Greg Clayman: The funny thing is, the inspiration was the iPad itself. When we all first got iPads and started really seeing what was possible, how it changed the way people interacted with media, it became clear that it really called for products that were custom designed for it. If you really want to engage the audience and take advantage of the platform, our thinking was you need to start from scratch.

JM: So how did you go about that?

GC: We put some of the best writers, photographers, videographers, designers, infographic “ninjas” and animators into a large room and said, “We’d like to come up with 100-plus pages of original content every day.

What can you guys do? What does that look like to you?” If the iPad is the palette, let’s start there and then back into what content makes sense.

JM: Your tagline is “new times demand new journalism.” Today we are telling stories in very different ways, and often in a very non-linear fashion. How is The Daily contributing to this evolution of information sharing?

GC: Exactly. Instead of, “Let’s start with a piece of writing that somebody has and put some interactive elements onto it,” some stories begin their lives as images, some begin their lives as videos, some begin their lives as tweets. Stories are being told in different ways and in different mediums. The nicest part about this platform is that it lets you bring all those together into one place, into one product.

JM: How does your creative process open up these new ways of telling stories in a daily publication?

GC: With the recent situation in Egypt, you read lots of stories about the Cairo Museum being looted, then other stories said not, then some stories said, “Actually there were soldiers in there.” So we said, “Okay, what does it feel like in Tahrir Square during the actual protests?” So

we sent our 360-degree photographer to Egypt. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen; you really, really felt like you were there. There were some places that were smashed up, some places that weren’t; you saw the soldiers there with their guns. So I think we are allowed to be more creative with the media that we use to tell the stories because our product is custom designed to enable the use of all those different media.

Another example: Elizabeth Taylor passed away, and we were looking at all the images we have of her and we had like a gazillion images from her entire career. And we were like, “We should make a custom issue, an image book of Elizabeth Taylor.

We have the platform for it.”

Twenty-four hours after she passed away we had an 80-page book on the market that was just images and video clips. So we have a tremendous amount of flexibility in how we tell stories.

JM: What role does technology play in delivering on the creative vision?

GC: The entire thing. We couldn’t do what we do without the technology that exists. We are a technology product. We have built a digital newsroom and production flow that allows people access across all different forms and formats. They can store everything in our system.

Our whole system sits in the cloud. You can contribute if you are a writer or a photographer, you can edit it, publish it from an iPad, from anywhere in the world. And, of course, there’s the application itself, which allows the magic to happen. The challenge has been tying all of these together seamlessly. We built the app, we built the back end, and we built the publishing system, all in six months, which is insanely fast. But we are very nimble and very aggressive.

JM: Wow, so the editors and journalists can all work remotely on their pieces.

GC: Yes, they can. Again, we tend to come together in a room because you get a lot of benefit from having an active and engaged newsroom of people yelling across the desks at each other. There’s a tremendous

amount to be said for real-life interaction, but our content management system is in the cloud.

JM: How has the customer feedback been so far?

GC: Fantastic. We find ourselves appealing to a really wide audience. Believe it or not, it maps almost exactly to the U.S. Census in terms of where our subscribers are. We are specifically an editorial product, we are a curator, so people are reacting well to the things that we curate and the content itself. You can comment within the app, audio and/ or text, and our more popular articles get hundreds, sometimes thousands of comments. One guy rapped! We do this thing called “sound off” and we let people respond. We had a question two days ago about the Beastie Boys, and we said, “How old is too old to be a hip-hop star?” And one guy, an older dude himself, responded by recording an audio, in rhyme, rapping about how it was okay, and that was terrific.

JM: Maybe he’ll get discovered.

GC: He could (laughs).

JM: Can you share with us any creative experience that has changed your world? Or changed the world in general, in your opinion?

GC: Can I go with my world?

That’s easier. Do you use Instapaper?

JM: Don’t use it, but know it.

GC: It’s a creative piece of software in that it brings online articles and reading to the tablet in a way that’s stripped down, very clean, and basically turns them into pages of a book or a magazine. It is the opposite of lots of color, garish bells and whistles, all kinds of crazy “look at me, look at me.” It basically takes the important information out of this article—the words— ­and puts them on your iPad or iPhone in an incredibly elegant and a very creative way. It has fundamentally changed the way I consume content online. It has changed my world.

Jeff Mancini is Senior Director, Digital Strategy, Interbrand New York

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IQ ON street art

Hacking the third dimension

Words like “disruption,” “guerilla,” and “subversive” get thrown around a lot by marketers and intellectuals. But very few of them have ever scaled a barbed wire fence at 3:00am with a bag of Krylon cans slung over one shoulder, or sussed out the right moment to use a fire extinguisher to spray 20-foot-high tags on the wall of a government building.

KATSU, on the other hand, insists on illegality and danger as precisely the point of graffiti. Like generations of graffiti writers before him, KATSU knows about subversion—and risk. Since the late 1970s and 1980s, graffiti artists like Jean Michel Basquiat (SAMO) and Keith Haring have used walls and subways as their “gallery” to explicitly challenge the artificial divide between graffiti and art. Like them, KATSU subverts the way society wants to consume and contain its artists. In conversation it becomes clear that KATSU, perhaps even more than many others of this outlaw breed, cannot be contained.

graffiti artist KATSU in conversation with ALAN ROLL

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Alan Roll: How did you get started with graffiti?

KATSU: Growing up in a rural town, my family would take trips to the big city once in a blue moon. On those trips I would stare at everything that didn’t exist in the rural setting. I was fascinated with the homeless, alleys, drunks, and especially graffiti. I remember seeing a fluorescent yellow-and-black graffiti piece in a construction site in the city center. I was blown away by the graphic quality and placement of this amazing visual. I decided I just had to create a secret identity for myself and get good at spray painting.

Photography: Martha Cooper

AR: How has graffiti culture evolved over time? Is it becoming more conceptual?

K: Graffiti culture has evolved into many different sub-categories.

There are bombers, taggers, piecers and street artists. All of these groups use old school graffiti traditions and apply more modern ideas to make them more efficient. Overall, graffiti has become much more conceptual. Getting noticed now demands more than simply repeating your logo everywhere. Other graffiti writers and artists demand more creativity for their attention. This pushes everyone to think outside the box.

AR: To the blind eye, your work seems impromptu and adrenaline-fed.

How would you describe your creative process?

K: I do not have one specific process. All my work is about experimentation. I’m always trying to push myself and how KATSU is viewed.

There is a quantitative system in judging the validity and strength of graffiti. I try to re-work that system every time I activate KATSU. AR: Can you elaborate on your quantitative analysis? What factors do you consider?

In an attempt to “test Jeffrey Deitch’s motives” for putting on an exhibition of graffiti art, KATSU used a fire extinguisher to spray a 30-foot tag on the side of the LA MoCA during the show.

K: For me, personally, it’s all about different risks. How risky is the location? Are there night watchmen? Will you get your ass beat or shot by locals or building owners? How easily could you fall to your death?

How risky is what you installed? Did you use spray cans? Did you use an extinguisher? Did you paint a giant portrait of Osama bin Laden making out with Hitler? How much time did you have to spend on location, working? Was it a large stencil that took five minutes? Was it a giant bubble letter that took 20 minutes? I like to also weigh how risky or challenging the piece is based on the artist’s history. If it’s a new young writer and they put their ass on the line to execute something difficult, I may value that more than a person I’d expect something risky from. At the end of the day, if you blast a police precinct with a bright pink fire extinguisher, I’ll like you.

AR: Your skull character—who is he?

K: The goal was to create a single stroke skull. At the time that I created my skull in high school, I believed that a single stroke tag

“ At the end of the day, if you blast a police precinct with a bright pink fire extinguisher, I’ll like you.”

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KATSU says his proliferating fake phone booth ads “represent the surrendering of opinions by us consumers in the face of celebrities and corporations.”

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would look and feel efficient and beautiful. I also liked the idea of marking buildings with a skull as if condemning them. The skull is a very powerful symbol. It represents human mortality. The skull is a logo.

AR: Do you view graffiti as a social messaging platform?

K: Absolutely. Graffiti writers communicate in distinct coded ways with multiple social groups. We communicate with each other, expressing opinions, challenging each other, questioning each other’s decisions. We communicate with law enforcement, creating the atmosphere they are hired to clean up. We communicate with the general public, angering property owners, bewildering passers-by, letting the public know that there is an underbelly to their culture that transgresses security, fences and walls.

AR: Your latest series of phone booth faux-ads features celebrities, well-known brand logos, and either your tag or your skull character.

What message were you trying to convey by bringing these together?

Why did you choose to pair those particular brands and celebrities?

K: There were different messages for different audiences. For graffiti writers, the message was “YUP, KATSU’S DOING SOMETHING WITH THE MOMA AND JAY-Z.” For the general population the message was, “KATSU IS IMPORTANT.” The pairings felt appropriate in communicating that KATSU was valuable as a commodity and as a creative entity. I used the celebrities as props to draw attention and give narrative to the ads. Whatever the general population wanted to say about the ads was all completely correct. If you thought they were dumb, you were right. If you thought they were brilliant, you were right. They represent the surrendering of opinion by us consumers in the face of celebrities and corporations.

AR: You have an app for the iPhone. Why move tagging from walls to the web?

K: I was introduced to a programmer who was interested in designing digital tools for graffiti artists. I felt that an iPhone app would do me real well and double in promoting KATSU. For one, graffiti fanatics would really appreciate the app and associate KATSU with the progressive tool. Secondly, I now had a way to place my tag on people’s iPhones. The app icon is the KATSU skull. Thousands of people worldwide have my tag on their iPhones.

AR: In this hyper-digital age, where do you think the next life for graffiti is?

K: Graffiti will be where the highest reward for risk is. Public and private property will always be the best arena for this. I think that how your marking and message arrives is going to involve new technologies.

I think techniques are going to come straight out of sci-fi movies. I’m very excited when graffiti is considered a form of hacking. It is a way

“ The skull is a very powerful symbol. It represents human mortality. The skull is a logo.”

of finding loopholes and secret entrances into physical places and delivering messaging through unexpected ways. Hacker graffiti has a nice ring to it.

AR: You have a few fake videos online­­—your White House tag and your Picasso at MoMA. How important is perception versus authenticity in your work?

K: Graffiti writers are very serious about what they do. You can definitely die, get beaten up, arrested and locked in a cell for doing graffiti. Graffiti artists risk being charged for every vandalism they have ever committed in a given jurisdiction, not just the one tag they might get caught doing. Graffiti has to be authentic.

The videos ask the question “What is authentic and why does authenticity matter?” I was trying to get graffiti artists to rethink the method one could use in getting notoriety. The videos themselves were tags, just in the form of video and on the Internet. The fake videos were also a way for KATSU to show off his After Effects skills…which are much better now.

AR: You need to remain anonymous to avoid jail time, but your craft requires that you be authentic. How do you balance that?

K: Being authentic comes through crime. Displaying my face does nothing to authenticate my graffiti.

AR: A few weeks ago, MoCA in LA showed the first major graffiti exhibit, called “Art in the Streets,” and a certain point has been much debated: Is graffiti art? What’s your take?

K: Graffiti is the expression of a special population of humans that didn’t get enough breast milk when they were young.

AR: Will you ever move tagging from walls to canvas?

K: I will never quit doing illegal graffiti. That will always be the true form of tagging. Creating graffiti work for galleries and exhibitions is always good promotion for your tag as long as you don’t quit real graffiti. Art movements have always taken place in a studio and within the arena of academics and law. Graffiti always involves the risk of arrest and that really changes the traditional artistic process.

AR: Can you share with us a creative experience that changed your world?

K: During the installation of the MoCA graffiti show, the museum was outfitted with a team of security officers and surveillance cameras.

Graffiti artist KATSU flew to LA and scoped out the MoCA. KATSU distracted the security officers with the help of fellow graffiti gang members, and in broad daylight, using an enamel-filled fire extinguisher, tagged the show with 30-foot-high letters. KATSU tagged the exhibition in an effort to test Jeffrey Deitch’s motives behind the show. Graffiti artists installing their work, including Shepard Fairey, Neck Face, and Barry McGee, were all amazed at what had happened and asked that the giant KATSU tag be left up as part of the exhibition.

Jeffrey Deitch had the tag scrubbed and buffed that night.

The stunt was filmed and photographed and leaked to the web. The grafiti-ing of the graffiti show went viral and people began talking: “Why would Jeffrey Deitch destroy graffiti if he felt it was a beautiful art form?”

Alan Roll is Creative Director, Interactive, Interbrand New York

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IQ on global citizenship

Lives on the line

Nonprofit founder Amy Stokes In conversation with Tom Zara

Some say that it takes a village to raise a child. So what happens when there is no village? If you’re Amy Stokes, you create one on a global scale. Her groundbreaking initiative, Infinite Family, connects some of Southern Africa’s neediest children with mentors half a world away through video conversation offering them the adult support they lack at home. As the organization’s website puts it: “Being a teenager is tough. Being a teenager without a strong and stable family in sub-Saharan Africa is really tough.” The program’s brilliance is the simplicity of its core idea: In the 21st century, distance should be no barrier to making a difference.

Video conferencing bridges physical distances to bring at-risk children together with much-needed mentors.

Weaving a global family, one video chat at a time

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Infinite Family staff with the first group of mentees from Alexandra Childcare Support Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, February 2010.

Tom Zara: Where did Infinite Family come from?

Did someone lead you down the path or is this something that has just been part of who you are?

Amy Stokes: It is absolutely something that I am and have always been, but I think it also comes from how I was brought up. I grew up in a very small town, very rural in nature, and I watched both my family and the people around us building things, fixing things and making things that didn’t exist, because you couldn’t just go to the store and buy them. My dad is a consummate builder, fixer, problem-solver. I was a studio artist for a little while and I realized that creativity and problemsolving are two words you can’t have without each other. I had a vision of what I wanted to create, and every action I took was to solve a problem towards something that had never existed before. So if you’re asking what is the driving force, it’s just simply: Things shouldn’t be like this, so what do we need to do to fix them?

TZ: So where is the genesis for the heroic things that you do?

AS: I think that I have always known, since I was a teenager, that there was something I was supposed to do and my job was to find it. It wasn’t until we adopted our son from South Africa that I understood where the greatest need was for me to offer whatever I had to offer: skills, time, whatever it was that could be useful. I had worked with teenagers

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from the south side of Chicago at the intersection of four different gangs as part of ShoreBank, a community development bank. I thought I was teaching them business skills and entrepreneurship, but what I learned very quickly was that I was the first person who sat down with them every day and listened to where they wanted to go and helped figure out how to get there. If you flash forward to when we were adopting our son, and when I returned in 2005, I was walking around the orphanages and seeing hundreds and hundreds of kids. I knew how important a relationship with an adult is in getting you to make decisions about your own life as a teenager. I think that’s where the spark was lit that I had to find a way to help these children build real relationships, despite geographic and cultural boundaries. That’s where Infinite Family came from.

TZ: How do you transfer this extension of yourself to others such that they protect it and propel the idea the way you intended?

AS: From the very beginning, Infinite Family has been about the team­—that this is not just Amy’s crazy idea, that there is a large group of people who have offered their talents and insight to make this work. Early on, the team was asking questions of our partners and the people we needed to work with us, to the point where we based Infinite Family, not only on the needs of the mentors or the kids, but based on the needs of all our partners. The only

Infinite Family staff with mentees at the launch of Tsogang Sechaba Community Project in Soweto Township, Johannesburg, February 2010.

reason Infinite Family exists is that there have been four or five hundred people involved since we got started. We are so conscious of the fact that we need everybody because none of us are direct experts.

Everything we’re doing is new.

TZ: As you look around in the marketplace, what other non-profit brands inspire you? Which ones do you think are doing things that are truly innovative and truly creative and changing the space that they work in?

TZ: Is there a lesson that you have learned that would help others understand that charity is about creating healthy and sustainable relationships?

AS: Save the Children is a world leader in helping kids in thousands of different communities in thousands of different ways, and they’ve created a worldwide brand so that people know exactly who they are. There is another organization in South Africa that is starting a new school system, and we are really looking forward to working with them.

They have completely turned what school is on its end and how you develop children from broken families­—not only academically but holistically.

They’re called LEAP schools. When I think from a branding perspective, the Red Cross has the amazing ability to be the first-line responder to a crisis and to get people to donate. They’re astounding. I would love to have their world recognition someday.

AS: I think we learn every day from our partners. I mean we’ve tried things they told us not to try and we tried anyway, and they were so right. If there is something that we value and have at the core of every decision that we make, it’s that our relationships and partnerships make this work. There are lots of people doing really good work, lots of NGOs doing amazing things for kids, but the scale of the problem is so immense. We are trying to provide support that doesn’t exist in sub-Saharan Africa because a big part of a generation of young parents is gone. So we are filling in, trying to bring to the table something that supports the whole community: the kids, the NGOs, and the guardians in the community. There are a lot of really smart people out here that want to do something, especially if they can be involved in a direct way, so we are in the process of creating something bigger than any of us, but it’s only because we are building this tightly knit set of relationships. It’s not an I or a me, it’s a we—it’s all of the mentors, it’s all the kids, staff, the NGOs, it’s the board, it’s the volunteers.

Tom Zara is Global Practice Leader, Corporate Citizenship, Interbrand

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Forensic Architecture

IQ ON ARCHITECTURE

architect Hani Rashid in conversation with Brian Kenet

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Previous page: Inside the Yas Hotel in Abu Dhabi, designed by Asymptote Architecture.

The Yas Marina Formula One racetrack, home of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, passes around and under the Yas Hotel.

The word architect doesn’t quite capture Hani Rashid. The founder and principal, along with partner Lise Anne Couture, of Asymptote Architecture, Rashid prefers to think of himself as a “spatial engineer.” It’s hard to classify someone whose projects have ranged from a future-focused art installation to a master plan for 28 hectares in central Prague; from a virtual trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange to the sweeping Yas Hotel straddling a Formula One racetrack in Abu Dhabi.

What can be said with certainty is that Rashid is as much an artist as an architect, and by venturing to truly understand what makes his clients tick, he’s forging new ground for his profession—whatever its name.

Brian Kenet: I know you’re always busy with multiple projects. What’s the latest?

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Hani Rashid: Well, I’m a little jetlagged because I just got back from Asia where we presented a proposal to a major automobile manufacturer for the future of their brand from an architectural point of view.

BK: What kind of methodology do you use to grasp the identity of a client like that?

HR: When we start a project I always tell my staff that we have to spend a little bit of time extracting the DNA of the brand. Because our world is predominantly visual and tectonic, it usually means looking for visual cues to their core aesthetic and their approach to space. With this manufacturer, we looked at the aesthetic of their cars, but more importantly, at the aesthetic of their logo, their marketing. We looked at all their advertising because the branding exercise done by advertising companies tends to be a sort of distillation of what the company is after. It’s like we walk into a forest and start to tap the syrup from the trees that have already grown there, and we present back to them a portrayal of their company in a physical form that we think is timeless. Our job really is to make things more concrete, more stable, and perhaps more permanent.

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BK: Do you find when you extract this DNA and present it back to the client that you surprise them with conclusions that are maybe different than what they thought?

HR: More often than not. I remember with the New York Stock Exchange, Lise Anne and I were presenting, and they turned and offered her a job on their board because, they said, “You understand our business better than we do.”

BK: What was the project?

HR: It was their virtual-reality trading environment. That was one of those projects where the architecture community was telling us that we were crazy and that it wasn’t architecture and blah, blah, blah. It was a very big, ambitious virtual environment, and then we also built a small physical trading floor that tied it all together. But yeah, they were pleasantly surprised by how deeply we dug into, not just their brand, but also into their business model. Something like advertising skims the surface of the brand, while we have to go many more layers to find the things that we want to push forward for these clients.

And that’s where I find it ironic, because in an advertising campaign one understands the payback on a $10 million investment; in our business it’s like pulling teeth to have people understand the return on a $5 million investment in an interior, but…

BK: And usually most designers are not capable of calculating that, either conceptually or…

Asymptote was commissioned to design a physical command center to complement their pioneering design of a virtual-reality trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange.

HR: We do, and I am very cognizant of it. I remember selling Carlos Miele his store idea. He was hesitant on the budget, and I said to him, “Look, you can buy this store, or, for what it’s going to cost to build it, you can put a billboard in Times Square.” His eyebrows lifted, and he went ahead and invested in the store. And it wasn’t a fickle investment because that store has been far more powerful in terms of its return to his brand because it’s a three-dimensional billboard. Even the way we lit it, the way it is presented in the window, it is very purposefully done as a kind of spatial diorama off of 14th street that you can’t help but notice. So changing hats and play acting at advertising a little bit helps us a lot in formulating a project that speaks to the client in a more aggressive and eloquent way. Architects, historically, have not done that very well. They sit on their high horse and claim that this is what you need, with no explanation—just, “I’m an architect.” Generationally, we’ve learned that we are equals with our clients in the sense that we have to get in the trenches together.

BK: My assumption is you didn’t learn this in design school, so the question is, where did you learn it?

HR: Really the best answer is that I learned it from the clients.

Working with the Stock Exchange, I remember sitting with them in the first meeting, and I thought it was very strange, because at the time we were used to circulating in the art world. I remember how amazed I was to be in that domain and listening to those people talk about things that were so foreign to us as artists but so intriguing to us as architects. That’s when our ears perked up to how much these companies need us, quite frankly, even though they don’t realize it.

There is a lot there in terms of how we as a discipline have to shape shift to suit what the situation is today.

BK: Well it does seem that, in general, there has been a steady decline in the influence of architects. As projects become more complicated and more money is at stake, they seem to be less and less a part of that decision making.

“ It’s like we walk into a forest and start to tap the syrup from the trees.”

HR: Yeah, and from our point of view it’s actually very healthy, because it means the discipline has to shift to stay relevant. When 52

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you get into things like the environment or urban space, cultures, citizenry, what makes a great city—if you see a city as a brand it puts it in a very different position. You’re not imposing a master planning attitude, you actually have your ear on the track trying to figure out what makes this place click: Why do they need a new transport system, why do they need housing and central business districts and parks?

We’re doing two big projects now in China and those are the conversations we’re having.

BK: Are these master plans for new cities?

HR: One is the beginning of a new city project, and the other one, I guess it is technically a new city, but we’re working on an existing master plan.

BK: So what are the similarities and differences you find working on a master plan for an existing city than from, let’s say, one you are creating from scratch?

HR: Well I think in the end there isn’t a lot of difference, because you’re involved in the same complexities of local governments and public opinion and clients who have financial needs. On the one hand, it all sounds very nice: my romantic view of extracting DNA and working with the city to give them the artistry, poetry, sensitivity, and a bit of madness maybe. On the other side of that is a juggling act with hardcore commerce—return on the dollar, square footages, how many hotels are they going to fit in. It’s a really strange kind of double identity that you have to play.

BK: So it’s not as if one is heavily constrained by the past and the other has no constraints?

Asymptote’s proposals for Mercedes Benz and BMW were conceived as physical extensions of their rival identities: “They are like city states in Medieval Italy watching each other like hawks.”

HR: No, ironically, the past is not constraining enough—it just tends to be a kind of template. When we work on a city plan, we don’t start with the origins but tend to fast forward to a period where we are now.

It’s a lot more difficult to go in and say, “Oh no, you don’t really need this, you can do different modes of transport, you can have different relations between green space and physical space, you can even think about different ways of building your buildings using modeling and computing.” Or take the Yas Hotel. It may not look like it on the surface, but our battle cry was to find something that is culturally pertinent and specific to that part of the world, as opposed to just a kind of wholesale importation of Western architecture—another glass tower that could be in Chicago or Des Moines. You think that would resonate with the sheiks and the local ex-pat CEOs, but they are looking at you like you’re strange and they say, “Well, no, we actually want what’s in Chicago and Des Moines.” On that one we fought it tooth and nail, and we actually won it because of how fast track that project was. We did so much stuff under the radar that we got it out of the ground and built in 16 months—it was kind of a shock to everybody. I remember walking with the CEO, a British guy, a very nice guy, and he looked at me, and in his English accent said, “Had we known what you were building, we probably would have stopped you, but we had no time.” And he said, “It’s amazing.”

BK: It’s definitely not Des Moines.

HR: Well, we’ve come a long way from simply building a building and sticking the word Pan Am on it or something. We find ourselves in a very different conversation by virtue of the clients’ maturing understanding of what they need and a more disarming approach to those clients by the architect. But we still like to stick their name on it.

Brian Kenet is a Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Consulting Principal at the Environmental Financial Consulting Group 54

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This Way Forward

Changing the world from a brand perspective Craig Stout

Change takes courage People don’t like change. The survival instincts of human beings make us adverse to difference— we need to know our basic needs are going to be provided for safely and regularly. Historically, brands have sought to soothe our anxieties with promises of consistency and reliability.

Conversely, we are excited by the thrill of something new and better—the promise that lies on the other side of upheaval. Today’s markets are characterized by both flux and abundance, and the desires of consumers are constantly shifting.

Brands now have a choice: Drive this process or lapse into irrelevance.

To survive, brands need to offer difference and newness as surely as they offer their particular product or service. And that requires a substantial investment of time, money, and creative energy, often with dividends difficult to measure. But look at the companies on Interbrand’s annual Best Global Brands list, like Google, IBM, or Coca-Cola.

They all take the risks required to stay relevant in the minds of their customers and clients.

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Consider the courage required to forgo advertising on the homepage of the world’s most popular search engine. Or telling the world your servers and tech consulting are going to save the planet by making it smarter.

Powerful brands redefine markets by reimagining human desires. They have the courage it takes to anticipate, drive, and embrace change. In the interaction between brands and the world, this is the definition of the creative spirit.

Change takes vision Change is hard. It has perceived risk and tangible expense. But not changing is riskier and more expensive in the long run.

Established companies have a tendency to get complacent after initial successes, and often new ideas and investments fall by the wayside. Hugely successful brands in a variety of industries— Internet service providers, manufacturers, record labels, newspapers, and magazines—have failed to innovate and been superseded by new regimes.

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an organization to overcome the inertia gripping a business and to make innovation a reality.

Those who undergo a branding change are, in essence, putting faith in a future that is yet to be conceived, betting on tomorrow with all its uncertainty and promise. This requires strategic thinking, to be sure, and that strategy should be grounded in science: qualitative and quantitative research, modeling, and analysis. But there comes a point where the science must be used to make art.

Change comes from within Even with the willingness to make a leap of faith, organizations will never change the world until they can change themselves from within. It needs to start with the man in the mirror—and in this case that man or woman needs to be at the very top of the organization. When engagement is signaled from the C-suite and flows down and through the organization, it becomes part of the company’s culture.

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Every organization has the untapped capacity of its own people as its greatest potential asset.

Unlock that asset by engaging and energizing your team, and you are positioning yourself to make real change in the marketplace and the wider world.

If employees feel uninformed when change happens—be it mergers, acquisitions, growth, or an evolving business environment—they will become disengaged, cynical, and ultimately negative. The most brilliant strategic framework and idea will remain in a PowerPoint presentation if not embraced by your people.

Change takes inspiration The economic events of the past several years have dramatically altered the rules of brand creation and evolution. What has become clear is this: Change that grows from aspiration­­—a vision of a different future and the energy to build it—is what motivates true leaders. They are able to use their sense of possibility to become the champions that motivate their organizations to embrace change.

It just takes someone, be it executive or manager, to step up and inspire belief.

These kinds of visionary, business-changing breakthroughs go beyond marketing and advertising campaigns. Powerful ideas change the world, not the mere cosmetic executions. H&M is an idea that everyone can afford the latest fashion.

Twitter is an idea that we all want to connect and share our lives minute by minute. Starbucks is an idea that we all need a third place beyond home

and work. Nike is an idea that if you have a body, you are an athlete. Visionary leaders are able to tap into universal human truths through creative ideas that make brands resonate in people’s lives.

In the end, a brand needs to be more than an LLC or an Inc. with a product or service for sale. What matters most is the ability to inspire people. That means you need to be inspired yourself and to convey that inspiration in all you do. People tend to fear the unknown, yet everyone is thrilled by the new. If you’re a brand today, you need to be a guide, someone who shows us a new way to be in the world.

Craig Stout is Senior Creative Director, Interbrand New York

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Brands in the key of

real

Artists, entrepreneurs— and your company

Daniel Diez: How does that become useful information for a corporation, say?

PN: The inspiration that a “non-brand” would give me is that all of the decisions they have made have been pure to their vision, even if that vision was never articulated in a positioning statement. It’s fair to say that organizations of all sizes and stripes have something to learn from these artists, these “non-brands.”

DD: Why?

PN: Because they tend to do, more intuitively, what we as strategists do for an organization. It’s knowing what I stand for, not compromising what we stand for, it’s listening to logic—and discarding it when needed, creating a very definitive style and sticking to it And the art world is full of the kinds of behaviors that I would say brands should follow.

DD: Are there any companies out there that behave this way?

paola norambuena in conversation with peter cenedella and Daniel Diez

In the early stages of planning for this issue, knowing we would have the opportunity to speak with several creative luminaries about what they do, and to think imaginatively about branding, Interbrand’s Paola Norambuena brought up an interesting phrase: When a brand is not a brand, it’s still a brand. We sat down again recently, after the many exciting conversations with artists and designers, architects, activists, and media mavens were finished, and we reassessed what that phrase meant and how it might inspire any organization.

Peter Cenedella: So what does it mean to say that “even when a brand is not a brand, it’s still a brand?”

What is a “non-brand”?

Paola Norambuena: Well an artist, to some, is a non-brand, but as we’ve seen in our conversations with Paola Antonelli, Massimo Vignelli, and others, a great artist, designer, or musician is, in the purest sense, a brand. Not because he sets out to be a brand, but because he inherently knows who he is, and stays true to that. He listens to his passions, listens to the pulse in the marketplace, follows that pulse, and then leaps off from there to do something unique. As we get to know them, as we want to like what they like and own what they have, and

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recognize ourselves in their expression, they become brands for us. A painter like Mark Rothko is a brand because I recognize the meaning, I recognize the vision, the name alone tells me something I can imagine, even a price point.

A lot of companies aspire to that kind of status, but they often think it can be had in the machinations that go into defining a brand, and a lot of strategizing.

But in the end, it is about intuitively being oneself.

And although this is often harder for an organization than it is for an individual artist, it can be done.

PN: The Kidrobot brand has taken that kind of approach. And it’s largely because their founder, Paul Budnitz, is a young entrepreneur who set out to do something, was passionate about it, learned from challenges, and then focused in on what he loved and did it to the Nth degree. That’s generally something that you see with younger brands, smaller brands, companies that have that renegade spirit in their DNA. When you listen to 26-year-old Internet startup guys talk, they have a very clear sense of who they are, of what they want, a very clear sense of the cultures they want to build and of the products they want to deliver.

But just as Budnitz embodies that, so does the older and more established Steve Jobs. So it is possible to be established and large, yet still true to an intuitive and artistic approach—a visionary approach—to brand.

PC: You hit on the notion that young and hungry brands often learn from failure. What are some primary lessons of failure?

PN: It’s about getting to know yourself that much better. And part of that is understanding your limitations. So Facebook decided they needed a grown-up to come in and sell advertising. Kidrobot brought in financial people because they wanted to focus on the vision and let someone else deal with the spreadsheets. So it’s evolutionary. Big artists do it, as well. Lady Gaga and Madonna are artists and entrepreneurs, they understand how to build

themselves out, what their brand can and can’t sustain. Successful brands do this, whether they do it intuitively or by the letter of the business plan.

This process of building out, bringing in the grownups, evolving without losing the core—it allows the brands to be true to themselves but still reckon with the by-products of growth, of success. They cede some terrain as part of learning how to succeed. But you don’t give up the essence of what makes you unique. For instance, Kidrobot took its early cues from New York City, but eventually relocated to Colorado to get a fresh start on the creative side and shake things up. Sometimes what seems counterintuitive turns out to be the most logical way to build a great brand.

PC: If one of our jobs as a brand consultancy, often to larger brands, is to help them behave more like a lean, agile, wild-spirited entrepreneurial brand in certain respects, how do we do that? What does that look like?

PN: So many large organizations tend to ask: How can we be more nimble? Nimble, agile, all those words, seem counter-intuitive to size and scale.

But the proof is in companies like Apple that can make what appear to be very nimble decisions at the creative level and then bring the rest of the organization in behind it to deliver. Sometimes it’s celebrating scale because it’s what helps us be nimble. And sometimes defining who we’re not is more important than defining who we are.

DD: That’s interesting, it reminds me of what Vignelli said about his design epiphany, his a-ha moment, when he saw how Mies van der Rohe didn’t add elements to arrive at a finished design, but subtracted and subtracted until he knew: It’s done, there it is.

PN: Yes. It’s authenticity that compels you to take away and to know when to say no, because deciding what you won’t do is often much, much harder. It’s deciding who you are and sticking to it, and that’s the larger lesson we can learn from the brands that are not brands—artists, musicians and entrepreneurs, who no matter how much they shy away from the traditional definitions of business or brand, we still want to wear as a badge.

Paola Norambuena is Executive Director, Verbal Identity, Interbrand North America

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future world changers

brandspotting

London Olympics

Kickstarter

You can love or hate the branding, but not a day goes by in London where people aren’t talking about the 2012 Olympic games, on the streets or in the news. After the hardships of the last two years, this is an event that will hopefully carry England into a happier and more prosperous place. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience for a lot of people—like the schoolgirl who tested the velodrome before anyone else or the football club who will move into the Olympic stadium after the Games. 2012 promises to be an invigorating year of culture, art, music, and (obviously) sports.

Kickstarter is kicking down the barriers between ideas and reality.

It’s an online platform that anyone can use to crowdsource funding for their creative projects. Artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, whoever, can broadcast their project proposals to millions of viewers eager to contribute their support in increments from five dollars to ten thousand dollars. If you can capture the imagination of just a fraction of that crowd, you’ll have the cash to put your big idea into action. It’s a whole new way to start up.

Gion-Men Kruegel, Executive Creative Director, Interbrand London

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Jeremy Grimes, Associate Creative Director, Interbrand New York

WikiLeaks

Zynga

WikiLeaks is a contentious and uncontrollable catalyst for chaos.

Its unpredictable revelations are causing real-time change to our world. These changes are both positive and potentially dangerous.

The opportunity for a profound re-evaluation of our corporate and personal responsibilities has never been more accessible; how we digest these responsibilities will define our societies for generations to come.

Graham Hales, CEO, Interbrand London

Farmville anyone? With around 250 million monthly users, San Francisco-based Zynga has asserted itself as the clear leader in the new wilderness of online social gaming by pushing entertainment value over geek appeal. This spring, the company partnered with Lady Gaga to promote her latest album through a Gagaville world that gave players a sneak peak at the new songs, and the recent appointment of Jeffrey Katzenberg to their board is just another signal that the brand sees itself as more Hollywood than Silicon Valley.

Brand Obama 2.0

Japan

A brand whose strength goes from off the charts to underwater in 18 months, then stabilizes somewhere in the middle, is rare in the corporate world. But in politics? The question for Brand Obama on the threshold of the 2012 campaign is how to evolve the original, with its brash promise of a shiny new day, in the cold light of four years of ups, downs, and disappointments. And assuming the President secures a second term, will he feel the freedom that comes with knowing there are no more races to run? If so, the Obama Refresh may live up to the brand idea that swept him into office in ’08: Change.

Tokyo was awarded the right to host the 1964 Olympics in 1959.

To successfully hold the games, massive amounts of infrastructure had to be completed, including four major highways, two complete subway lines, and the “bullet train” linking Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. Japan’s incredible transformation was symbolized by the torchbearer at the opening ceremony: Yoshinori Sakai, a 19-year-old student born in Hiroshima on the day the atomic bomb was dropped on that city. Today Japan is embarking on another monumental transformation, and by drawing on the same spirit of courage and innovation displayed in the 1960s they will emerge from the disasters of March 2011 stronger than ever.

Peter Cenedella, Creative Copy Writing Practice Leader, Interbrand New York 62

What’s that brand coming on the horizon to change our lives? Or that idea so intricately ingrained into our world we hardly notice its significance? Our team of creatives and strategists eat, sleep, and breathe brand culture—so who better to ask about the biggest of the next big things?

Kurt Munger, Creative Director, Interbrand San Francisco

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who’s asking?

interviewing the interviewers

What’s one thing you would change about the world if you could?

Editor in Chief

Daniel Diez daniel.diez@interbrand.com

Brian Kenet is a Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Consulting Principal for the Environmental Financial Consulting Group.

His interview with architect Hani Rashid appears on page 48.

“I’d reverse the trend of urban sprawl—make larger, denser cities with better public transportation, better schools, and more open space.”

Jeff Mancini is Senior Director of Digital Strategy for Interbrand New York. His conversation with the publisher of The Daily, Greg Clayman, appears on page 32.

“I’d rewire everyone to be optimistic. Because optimism will breed the courage needed to change the world.”

Andy Payne is Interbrand’s Global Chief Creative

Alan Roll is Creative Director for Interactive for Interbrand New York. His conversation with the graffiti artist KATSU appears on page 36.

“One of the unfortunate outcomes of our competitive marketplace has been a barrier to massive collaborative innovation. Competitive patented technologies are developed in isolation rather than through collective advancement. I’d like to see more companies open their patents for use in adjacent industries.”

Craig Stout is Senior Creative Director for Interbrand New York. His column, “This Way Forward,” appears on page 56.

“I would like to change the world’s focus on consumer-driven growth models and start focusing on happiness-growth models. Business and government need to invest in making happier, healthier people, not just in creating economies based on consumption.”

Director. His conversation with designers Sir John Sorrell and Lady Frances Sorrell appears on page 28.

“I would make education available to all. A wider knowledge of the world around us and of how different yet similar we all are would be the foundation for solving many of the world’s problems.”

Tom Zara is Global Practice Leader, Corporate Citizenship for Interbrand. His conversation with Infinite Family founder Amy Stokes appears on page 44.

“The greatest impact we can have on our world to make it sustainable is to eradicate ignorance, so that the gift of education is shared by all and not squandered by few.”

Guest Editor & Creative Director

Chris Campbell chris.campbell@interbrand.com Editorial Director

Design Director

Peter Cenedella

Alan Lum

peter.cenedella@interbrand.com

alan.lum@interbrand.com

Creative Director, Interactive

Production Manager

Alan Roll

Annie Kissling

alan.roll@interbrand.com

annie.kissling@interbrand.com

Features Editor

Editor

Ian Collins

Charles Pringle

ian.collins@interbrand.com

charles.pringle@interbrand.com

Marketing and Events Manager

Shayla Persaud shayla.persaud@interbrand.com

Special thanks to: Peter Acimovic Jennifer Bassett Lindsay Beltzer Michelle Boisson Crystal Cannici Lee Carpenter Russell DeHaven Chris DiMaggio Josh Feldmeth

Lauren Gallo David Hong Chris Kline Paola Norambuena Moemen Omara Cristi Sauser Andrea Sullivan Lauren Thiele

Copyright © 2011 by Interbrand Corporation Interbrand IQ is published by Interbrand.

The paper used in this publication was produced from sustainably managed forests and contains 10% recycled post-consumer waste content.

For more information, including extended interview content, please visit www.InterbrandIQ.com. For questions and comments, email InterbrandIQ@interbrand.com. www.facebook.com/interbrand www.twitter.com/interbrand

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