By our current cultural standards, the strangeness of this notion is pretty extreme. Any designer already has to accomplish the near-paradoxical task of making art pay. Now, apparently, designers have been challenged to make altruism pay. All, I guess, through the miracles of creativity.

Sound cynical? Maybe I've taken on the tone of legendary designer and Designism 4.0 panelist Paula Scher, who objected several times to the "value judgment" Walters seemed to make between Scher's pro bono work (such as her famous Public Theater posters) and the newfangled "charity-pays-the-bills" model. "What's wrong with normal clients?" she asked Walters at one point.

Scher said that she often asks her less wealthy clients not to pay her because she has more control over the design and "spends less time in meetings" when she takes on the role of benefactor. In 2000, she designed the initial logo for New York City's High Line project without accepting a fee. During the above-ground park's recent construction, she was paid to create the signage, and didn't have much fun doing it.

William Drentell of Winterhouse Studio (and the popular blog Design Observer) had a different take on the issue. "Pro bono work is like tithing in the Catholic Church," he said. "That's not what the model should be. Designers need to get out of passive mode and start initiating the conversation."

Speaking about the Aspen Design Summit, a symposium on design activism from which he just returned, Drenttel said that there were few designers present who had not done fieldwork in Africa. "It's not enough to raise the money, you have to become sort of an expert," he explained. Later, he urged designers in the audience to ask themselves the question, "What would happen if we didn't do it the way we used to do it?"

The career of Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes (of the "one-for-one" policy that grants one pair of shoes to someone in need for every pair sold), lends legitimacy to the "change-agent-as-entrepeneur" model. The short promotional doc that kicked off his Designism talk had plenty of high-def images of Mycoskie among smiling kids in developing nations, as well as more than enough material to satisfy a Third World foot fetishist. Not a designer himself, Mycoskie revealed that his design department represents nearly 20% of his entire staff. "We are a design-led company," he said. "Design spreads the story and motivates people to act."

Design may play an important role in spreading the story of the TOMS Shoes brand, but not to be discounted, as Mycoskie admitted, is the impact of the Los Angeles Times profile that appeared very soon after the first 250 TOMS pairs were produced. More than 2,000 pairs were purchased online the day the Times piece came out. The TOMS success story would seem to underscore the importance of influential connections, a time-tested sustainable resource for any entrepeneur.

TOMS and ADC have collaborated on the "Walk the Walk" online auction, which allows bidders to compete on eBay for pairs of TOMS Shoes that have been reimagined by design superstars such as Louise Fili, Jessica Helfand, and Scott Stowell. Sample pairs were on view at Designism 4.0. Christoph Niemann's pair is adorned with painted-on bare feet, and Stowell's is almost completely covered in handwritten small talk ("I totally agree with you on that," and similar phrases). My favorite, though, is Ellen Lupton's, on which festive, curling lines provide a pleasant, accentuating contrast to the stark black letters "L" and "R," for "left" and "right."

Copy editor John Demetry had this to say:

From the Introduction ("Moving Forward") to the final chapter ("Twenty-First Century Renaissance"), the following four narratives move through Armond White's Keep Moving: The Michael Jackson Chronicles:

1) Armond White tracks MICHAEL JACKSON'S ARTISTIC EVOLUTION (as he takes command of his megastar status), specifically his articulation of anger, from the fascinatingly misjudged iconography of Bad ("Understanding Michael Jackson") to the dance coda of Black or White ("The Gloved One Is Not a Chump") to the vocal articulation in "Scream" ("Screaming To Be Heard, Book I & II") to his exhortations to "keep moving!" on the Blood On The Dance Floor remix project ("Hear, My Dears").

2) These essays provide insight into THE OEDIPAL DYNAMICS AND FAMILIAL COMPETITIVENESS THAT COMPELLED MJ to transform pop culture, as fleshed out in articles about sister Janet ("Janet, The Last Black Jackson"), brother Jermaine ("Sibling Song"), and patriarch Joseph ("Father Figure").

3) The book charts ARMOND WHITE'S DEVELOPMENT AS A CRITIC as revealed through his changing responses to MJ's own maturation as artist; as White rises to each of MJ's challenges ("Montell and Michael Exploit/Explore Happy-Negro Fallacy"), he refines his analyses ("Jackson and Jam-Lewis Hope Louder in New Remix"), increases his esteem ("Lists & Prizes in the Arts for 1995"), and modifies his emphases ("Song of the Day: Man in the Mirror") in response to the needs of the culture ("Remembering 'Ben'") and the emergence of a lynch-mob media ("In MJ's Shadow").

4) A POETICS OF MUSIC VIDEOS -- a singular critical-theoretical approach to an art form -- results from the collected works by the man (AW) who invented music video criticism about the man (MJ) who pushed the boundaries of the medium to encompass: ethnic history ("'How Deep Is Your Afrocentricity?'"), private sexuality and sexy solidarity ("Michael Takes a Bow for Jam"), capitalism's triumph ("Jackson's TV ad Makes Rhetorical History"), and the metaphysics of the pop star ("Earth Song Moves Music Video Mountains"); an interview ("Jackson Pop: Music Video Artists and Hollywood Influence") and an essay ("Videos Change the Style of 'Black Film'") help make this collection as definitive a statement of critic, artist, and art form as Andre Bazin's anthology on Jean Renoir.

This experiment in self-publishing is, I think, necessary because mainstream media (i.e., dumbed-down) discourse is the source of so much of the misunderstanding about MJ. Relentless, prejudiced scrutiny of his personal life has always taken precedence over clear-eyed examination of this pop artist's amazing body of work. As Jackson's music and videos grew more and more sophisticated, no mainstream voice emerged to guide us through the complexity. So deep was the confusion that at the turn of the millennium, we were still asking, to quote an Iraqi character from the movie Three Kings, "What is the problem with Michael Jackson?"

If you're able to get to Lincoln Center this Sunday, August 30, you'll want to attend "Keep Moving: Michael Jackson's Video Art," a lecture by Armond White that will feature a selection of MJ videos (on the big screen) and White's clarifying commentary. This event will be your first chance to get a copy of Keep Moving and have it signed.

Newcomers to White's work should check out "In MJ's Shadow," which assesses MJ's meaning and legacy. If you want more information on Keep Moving, or to place an order, e-mail resistanceworkswdc@yahoo.com.

Of course, an online tutorial is only as good as its creator. Who are our instructors? Among them are several Adobe-certified teachers, award-winning art directors, and design professors from such institutions as Parsons the New School for Design, New York University, and School of Visual Arts. These pros have a couple of things in common: All of them are highly experienced in the field they survey (they're successful practitioners as well as teachers), and they are all great communicators. Graphics.com/Learning allows, even encourages, its instructors to bring their humor, style, and individual outlook into the tutorials they create.

When it launched a year ago, the site offered just four tutorials. Since then, its library has expanded to encompass more than 40 hours of video. We're adding at least one brand-new movie every week. Despite this, our subscription rates remain recession-appropriate (starting at about 50 cents per day).

In honor of our first birthday, we're giving GDF blog readers a special opportunity to view a complete tutorial on our site for free. The freebie is Alex White's "Five Steps to Improve Your Design Process," in which White, a Parsons prof, guides you through five design principles that you can apply to get legible, memorable results: relationships, contrast, hierarchy, structure, and color. Using actual classroom examples, White shows how these five basic ideas can bring most any design to the next level. If you miss design school, or if you never went, this tutorial is definitely for you.

We hope you'll make the decision to subscribe, but if you'd rather get bragging rights along with your Graphics.com/Learning sub, why not compete in this month's Graphics.com Philter Phrenzy? Phrenzy participants download free images and combine them into an original composition. The three winners (chosen by Graphics.com staff) will each get an annual subscription to Graphics.com/Learning. 

And now, if you're ready, let's all sing the Graphics.com/Learning Happy Birthday song:

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

You look like a great opportunity for inexpensive online design-related education

And you smell like one too!

Charged with this significance, the images make you gasp. A playground shot of Liverpool kids spinning free of the ground around a maypole perfectly evokes the innocence of early experience, made even more fragile by the images of adult toil that surround it: the shipyards, the municipal laundry. The most moving and troubling sequence shows Liverpudlians pulling down old tenements, making way for high-rise eyesores...then the new apartment-dwellers on their balconies, scanning the cityscape uncertainly, expectantly. It's an analysis of the class system as cogent as any I've seen in a movie, but Davies transcends even this by underscoring the whole sequence with Peggy Lee's rendition of "The Folks Who Live on the Hill" for deep poignancy, not cheap irony.

Davies's narration, a near-breathless litany of vivid remembered details, restores the richness of ritual to visible history. Over shots of the seaside resort town of New Brighton, a common "day out" destination for Liverpool's working class, Davies explains, "A nation deprived of luxury relished these small delights." Here is where Davies marvelously introduces color archival footage, saying, "They board the ferry [across the Mersey River to New Brighton] in black-and-white, and disembark in color." Footage of a New Brighton bathing-beauty contest challenges our view of the pre-women's-lib past when knowing, free-and-easy female laughter appears on the soundtrack.

Social institutions, though, bring out the gravel in Davies's time-scarred voice. The opulence of a royal wedding (the November 1947 marriage of then-Princess Elizabeth) appears to mock the poverty of British tenement-dwellers, but the monarchy's detachment is defied by footage of the huge street parties Liverpool held to celebrate the event. Davies, a gay man, rejects the Catholic Church whose doctrine haunted the early stirrings of his sexuality, saying, "I was born again as an atheist, thank God." And as Liverpool's long-gone movie palaces fill the screen of memory, he comments on his childhood moviegoing experiences, "I gorged myself with a frequency that would shame a sinner." Davies rejects all orthodoxy, a thrilling application of Ezra Pound's modernist exhortation, "Make it new!"

This includes, apparently, the 21st-century orthodoxy of The New York Times. Dennis Lim's recent Times piece on Terence Davies and Of Time and the City invited a reductive response to the work, claiming, "...[H]e can...come off as a proud reactionary, stuck in a halcyon past, contemptuous of change. He laments the emergence of his contemporaries the Beatles, who killed 'the witty lyric and the well-crafted love song,' and spitefully scores images of dancing throngs at the Cavern Club to Mahler’s Second Symphony." The spite seems to originate from Lim, who forgets to mention that over those images of early rock-'n'-roll revelers and the snatches of Mahler, Davies intones a list of foreign musicians and composers whose names fascinated him and sparked his love of classical music. He isn't trying to drown out the Beatles; he's juxtaposing responses to pop and classical music, daring to sound the depths of fashion. This is far deeper than the Times ever goes.

Lim's most grievous misinterpretation is the charge: "Mr. Davies belongs to the species of miserablist — the English singer Morrissey is another example, though Mr. Davies would abhor the comparison — for whom unhappiness is not just an idée fixe but almost a badge of honor, something to flaunt and wallow in." The Morrissey comparison isn't Lim's own--he cribbed it without acknowledgment from Armond White's definitive book The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World. Not an original thinker, Lim bungles the obvious. Of Time and the City ends with a two-part display of hope: a shot of a rainbow against the blue Liverpool sky, then a shot of the night sky illuminated by fireworks. This call and response between heaven and earth expresses Davies's true identity: not a miserabilist (neither, by the way, is Morrissey) but a spiritual artist.

Of Time and the City opens at New York City's Film Forum on January 21st. Do not miss it.

Scott Thomas compared his experience working on Barackobama.com to "building an airplane in mid-flight." The frenzied pace of the campaign left little time for research and testing. He approached the task with a set of core principles: Pull from images from the past (to combat detractors' claims that Obama lacked the experience necessary to be president); Make it about 'We' instead of 'He'; and Dismantle the notion of 'aloof.'.

Political considerations drove crucial design decisions, including the campaign's famous choice of Gotham as the official Obama '08 typeface. Sender's initial logo used Gill Sans, but Gotham became the favored font partly because of the unsavory activities typographer Eric Gill wrote about in his personal diaries, such as child molestation (involving Gill's own children), incest, and bestiality.

When Heller asked Thomas to name the most heated design battle he had to fight during the campaign, Thomas brought up the infamous "presidential seal" debacle from June 2008, in which Obama (who was then not even the Democratic nominee for president) was criticized for using a seal that closely resembled that of the nation's chief executive. According to Thomas, an overzealous campaign worker on Obama's advance team ordered the seal to be created despite the warnings of the designers, but Thomas's team ended up in the hot seat. "My ear was buzzing for two days," Thomas said. Sender then provocatively suggested that although the "presidential seal" was used by the campaign only briefly, seeing Obama-the-candidate standing behind that familiar regal eagle had a lingering effect in the minds of voters. "There's a power in that image," said Sender.

Obama himself wasn't among those who chastised Thomas after the seal backlash, as you may have guessed. The candidate seldom had occasion to visit HQ, but Thomas spoke about a funny encounter he had with Obama: During one of his rare walk-throughs, Obama asked Thomas what he was up to, and the designer responded, "Making you look good. That's what we do all day: Photoshop your face."

All that Photoshopping paid off, as we now know. Obama's historic win must be at least partly attributed to the savvy and skills of the professionals responsible for his messaging. Though the campaign is over, the work of Thomas's team is memorialized in one final seal that is still around, at least for the time being: the seal of the office of the President-elect, which the triumphant Obama '08 designers whipped up the day after the election as a last hurrah.

Who, though, owns this work, including the world-renowned "O"? After Steven Heller asked that question, there was a short, confused silence, after which Thomas replied: "I think the best answer would be the American people."

Debbie Millman, national board member of AIGA and host of the internet radio show "Design Matters," presided over this year's 20/20 challenge, in which 20 thriving designers were asked to communicate the secret of their business success in a 60-second visual presentation. Standout participants included Michael Ian Kaye, Julia Hoffmann (of "the MoMA"), and Under Consideration's Armin Vit...but for sheer star power it was difficult to beat Chip Kidd, who told a joke about onanism in a doctor's office, and a personal anecdote about mishearing the phrase "I'm from Target" as "I'm retarded." It was funnier coming from him.

On the Saturday afternoon schedule was a talk to which I had been looking forward: "Girl Market Relevancy. Rethinking Creativity," by Heidi Dangelmaier and 3iying. Dangelmaier launched 3iying three years ago as an "all-girl innovation think tank" designed to offer major brands and agencies "the insights, creative concepts, and strategies they need to succeed" with young women. 3iying (the name combines "third eye" with "ying," as in "ying/yang") is unique in that outside of Dangelmaier, its brand experts are all millennial girls themselves, some of whom are recruited from New York City high schools and put through a rigorous selection and training process. If you're questioning my terminology, you should know that Dangelmaier and 3iying have embraced the word "girl" and use it freely.

Before the conference, I asked Heidi via email what GAIN attendees could expect from her talk, and her response was as follows: "I think people will learn that we need to rethink a vital part of [the] design process, which is how to achieve deep emotional connections with the consumer [...] As consumers grow more savvy and have radically more choices, they also become liberated - they no longer have to accept things they do not like. Choices allow people the privilege of making decisions based on emotions: hate, love, and desire. This new liberation forces design to raise its bar and become more sophisticated. Average will not cut it any more, we have to impress and inspire."

Dangelmaier prepared the crowd for her presentation by placing on every chair in the room a torn-out magazine page bearing an ad that "turned the girl off." (The Reebok ad on my chair, taken from CosmoGIRL!, showed a "boy-crazy" blonde getting freaky with a dorky-chic male model in a library. I assume the silly sexual stereotype was the reason for 3iying's objection. Ads near me were for Jimmy Choo and Simple Shoes.) Accompanied by two 3iying girls on GAIN's stage, she stressed the millions of dollars that are currently being wasted on ad campaigns and communications that don't connect with young women. The 3iying team claimed that design professionals can sometimes settle into an "I Am God" mentality, according to which design skills alone are enough to create a genuine connection with an audience. Dangelmaier's view, however, is that "there are some things you just can't fake." Without the ability actually to see the world through another person's (in this case, a young woman's) eyes, all the technique and hard work in the world won't help you get through.

During the talk, I sensed some resistance to 3iying, even a slow-building resentment of their message among some conference attendees. There were at least a handful of walkouts before the Q&A session, and a pointed silence greeted 3iying's joking description of their simultaneous collaborations with brands and agencies as "threesomes." Later in the day, Stephen Doyle of Doyle Partners injected an out-of-nowhere 3iying putdown into a talk about designing for Martha Stewart Living, saying, "I have one thing to say to 3iying: 'Like, oh my God.'"

I contacted Heidi Dangelmaier by phone this morning to get her reaction to 3iying's reception at GAIN. She had a lot to say on the topic. "It's so easy to be judgmental, biased, arrogant," she said. "I could have made them laugh for an hour, but my talk was about business. I think biases got in the way. Maybe they didn't want business from a girl."

Instead of receiving questions about the substance of the presentation, Dangelmaier was, in her words, "yelled at" by women at the conference who were offended by the sex-tinged humor in her talk. "No one asked about an ad!" she exclaimed. "This is about business: how to connect with consumers, how to be a professional design firm. No one asked about any of that. This is deeply more complex than 'Oh my God.'"

Designers who want to learn more about 3iying's "girl-approved design methodology" will get a golden opportunity next month when 3iying.com launches an online series of monthly lessons on how to reach the millennial girl audience. Asked for details about this initiative, Heidi wrote: "I think I will start with trying to end (once and for all) about 25 cliches that people use when marketing to females. We have collected a pretty big list of design trends that really need to just go away; to use them is to just throw your money out the window. After that we will just keep people in beat to what me and the girls find important - which often has nothing to do with what people are reading in the trend books."

I, for one, will be watching with interest.

UPDATE: (11/17) AIGA has posted video of several complete GAIN presentations, among them Michael Jager's, Stephen Doyle and Gael Towey's, and Heidi Dangelmaier and 3iying's.

In addition to being valuable in and of themselves, these videos may help readers who were not at GAIN to resolve for themselves the debates in the comments below.

The TONY editors certainly intend us--expect us--to agree with this chorus of celebrity complaints without skepticism. But the magazine's cover image, a Photoshopped gang's-all-here gathering of the "New York 40," complicates (to put it mildly) that assumed consensus.

The cover makes it immediately obvious that Time Out New York's social panorama is ruinously skewed. Of the 40 icons on view, only three (baseball superstar Derek Jeter, novelist Junot Diaz, and rapper/entrepeneur Jay-Z) are people of color. This 10-to-1 ratio, which doesn't reflect either actual NYC demographics or the heightened profile of non-white performers since hiphop gained mass acceptance, must be viewed as editorial preference.

Far from resisting gentrification, the cover concretizes ways of thinking that blot out non-white social and cultural contributions. The "positive impact" that people of color have had--can have--on their social environments is reduced to a token presence, barely noticeable amidst the capering and grinning of a benevolent white majority. This image in fact illustrates how popular culture (and design culture) itself has been gentrified in the last 15 years.

Of the speakers I saw, Gladwell did the best job of speaking to all of the conference's tribes simultaneously. He worked without a podium, hardly even glancing at his notes as he paced the stage. He had good reason to know his stuff: A Google search shows he's been giving versions of this speech for at least four years. It's a good one, with some surprising insights gleaned from his years of research on human behavior. Gladwell's talk was about how spaghetti-sauce producers influenced consumer reality in the 1970s by introducing alternatives to the traditional, "authentic" sauce (Extra Chunky et al). It's not hard to trace this development in consumer culture forward in time to our own day, in which a surfeit of choice threatens economic progress with a lasting fragmentation of the marketplace.

I thought of Gladwell's talk during a presentation given by Wende Zomnir, executive creative director of Urban Decay Cosmetics, on the last day of FUSE. Urban Decay had their Extra-Chunky moment of consumer connection when they first came on the scene in the mid-'90s with enamels and lipsticks in dark, unusual shades. "Beauty with an Edge" became the company's slogan, and Urban Decay's edgy appeal was cemented with its goth-glamorous product names, e.g. "Asphyxia," a pink-purple eye shadow. After pop culture's "alternative" moment passed, the company had to avoid going the way of Sassy and other relics of the period. Urban Decay's management adopted adaptable signatures (models in UD promo art are never pictured holding the product, only wearing it) and a "holy trinity" of elastic, overarching brand attributes--"Feminine/Dangerous/Fun"--to guide the company's growth into the mainstream marketplace. Zomnir summed it up this way: "We pretend that we don't appeal to the masses, but we do."

A recent example of successful innovation-in-the-mainstream from the Urban Decay catalog is the Hot Box Mini Makeup Kit, which conceals lip gloss, eye shadow, and mascara in a case whose size and shape echo those of a cigarette lighter. The kit's name was suggested by an Urban Decay assistant after the initial title, "The Walk of Shame Kit," was deemed too racy for underage makeup buyers (and their parents). The Hot Box won the fifth annual International Package Design of the Year award at the HBA Health and Beauty America Show in 2004.

If you're surprised by the presence of a tv-network executive on an ad-agency insider panel, as I was, you're not familiar with the latest mutations of 21st-century marketing. At the turn of the millennium, much was made of the then-new marketing term "synergy," but that once-controversial word doesn't do justice to the turbocharged product placement that is Meyer's stock-in-trade. She routinely works with sponsors to produce new-media supplements to televised content, such as the recent Project Runway online videos showing contestants cruising around NYC in Saturns. The commercials, designed to promote both the show and the automobile-maker, are housed on the Saturn website as a lingering endorsement. As Meyer explained, in the future Bravo plans to secure sponsorship for new shows before production even begins. "Product placement will become the first conversation we have," she said.

Unlike Meyer, ad execs can't rely on the goodwill of legions of reality-tv addicts. They have to chase after fickle, fragmented online audiences that have little tolerance for conventional advertising experiences. "Shame on any agency that only brings an outbound message," said Dawn Winchester. One fairly conservative way to engage web-savvy consumers is to associate a brand with an already-popular online phenomenon, as Dr. Pepper did with the YouTube sensation "Chocolate Rain." Marc Ruxin predicted, "The agency of the future will be looking outside the creative director."

The internet has enabled advertising to change in form as well as content. Guy Wieynk (whose last name, by the way, moderator McIlroy didn't even attempt to pronounce) of web site consultancy AKQA put it plainly: "Produce video, my friend." To drive home the point, he pointed out that eBay items with a video clip sell for 30% more on average than those without. Trevor Kaufman, CEO of Schematic, called for companies to adopt "radical transparency" on the internet by giving consumers behind-the-scenes glimpses of brands. Ruxin claimed that the best "ad" of the 21st century is the Google Toolbar. "It's about good content finding an audience. That was always important, but it's twice as important now," he explained.

As marketing strategies mutate, it becomes difficult to measure success, or even to define it. "How many views on YouTube is good? How does having 1,000 friends on Facebook stimulate sales?" were questions posed to the panel by Mark Ruxin. Throughout the evening, panelists mentioned the lack of metrics for online marketing, but Guy Wieynk disagreed. "You have to keep it simple," Wieynk stated. "You can track pretty much anything, but you have to know ahead of time what you want to track."

In the final, overarching disagreement of the panel discussion, Dawn Winchester voiced an objection to the very title of the event. "'The New Creative Agency' is not what we need to be building," she said. "Creativity and media need to be brought together. Media and infrastructure are as important as creative."

On the album, Goldfrapp steps away from up-tempo pop hooks, opting for orchestral folk-psychedelia that rewards repeated listening. The sound is a complete break with 2006's Supernature, the group's last album, which went so far into pop that it sometimes pandered. Alison's sensibility, however, remains poised somewhere between the emotional frankness of folk and the oblique expression of psychedelia. Without an immediately catchy chorus, her uncanny metaphors are all the more intriguingly bizarre.

The sun-bleached Serge Leblon photos show her cavorting through pastoral greenery in the company of a man in an owl costume (probably co-composer/producer Will Gregory, the other half of Goldfrapp). Interestingly, the first page of the accompanying notebook bears a drawing of a nude woman with an owl's head, one of many animal/human hybrid beings in the Goldfrapp visual oeuvre. Maybe Alison views her collaboration with Gregory on Seventh Tree as a way of recapturing a vanished oneness with Nature, analogous to the Dionysian revels she sings about on older, disco-y tracks such as "Ride a White Horse" and "Twist."

However you interpret it, the deluxe-edition Seventh Tree should make you grateful that music still exists in physical form. It should also make you aware that design, at its best, can alter--can enrich--content.

Postscript: Definitely check out The Look's post on Alison's (too-obvious?) style references in the Seventh Tree artwork.

Reagan-era political battles and cultural rifts still perplex many in academia. That's why I was so fascinated by Ewen's speech, which described a real threat to academic freedom that is advancing while many professors focus on the problems of the past. In the spring of 2007, Ewen says, Hunter College's Department of Film & Media Studies offered as part of its major a course in "stealth marketing" with a curriculum designed by IACC (International Anti-Counterfeit Corporation), "a non-profit organization devoted solely to protecting intellectual property and deterring counterfeiting." In essence, IACC's raison d'etre is to lobby for legislation against knockoff goods on behalf of its member companies. One of these, the Coach Corporation, manufacturer of shoes, handbags, and accessories, put up ten thousand dollars to fund the course.

A corporation-funded university class with a curriculum created by corporate lobbyists is questionable enough, but further violations of standard academic protocol were apparently involved here. According to Ewen, it appears that the class was the result of a direct request made by the president of the university to the department head. No tenured teachers were told about the department's new curricular direction; an untenured (therefore more pliable) faculty member with no marketing background was selected to teach the class. The anointed instructor voiced objections to the assignment, but ended up teaching the course anyway, with continuous supervision from a Coach lawyer. At no time, the Coach overseer stipulated, was the company's involvement to be mentioned in any of the completed class projects.

The product of this semester-long crash course in surreptitious advertising, termed a "college outreach campaign" by the IACC, was an elaborate fiction better suited to a creative-writing seminar than the classes in media criticism normally held within the department. Using authentic-seeming fliers, social networking websites, and a blog, the students wove a narrative concerning a nonexistent Hunter undergrad named "Heidi Cee" and her lost Coach bag, a precious gift from her boyfriend that she was desperate to recover. Heidi ponied up big reward money for the no-questions-asked return of the bag, only to find that she had been taken in by a knockoff. Incensed, she took to the internet in an attempt to crush counterfeiting. The campaign concluded in May with an anti-counterfeiting event at Hunter where IACC literature was distributed, along with free food from Olive Garden. Heidi explained her absence at the crucial event by claiming that her "uncle in Jersey" had suffered a minor stroke.

My jaundiced view of higher education usually prevents me from waxing sentimental about academic freedom, but I confess to sharing Professor Ewen's outrage in this case. When Ewen questioned the Ohio-based p.r. firm that created this course about the "Heidi Cee" project's deceptions, he was told by one of the firm's spin artists, "That's what kids do these days: create fake people on the internet." The spin doctor wasn't wrong; the web is hospitable to (young and old) perpetrators of unverifiable lies and half-truths. Some corporations appear to be eager to subsidize and magnify these transgressions, to the point of using universities as laboratories in which to grow profitable lies. Ohio State University, Howard University, and University of Miami are among the schools that have hosted IACC campaigns similar to Hunter's.

In this context, it's hard to cheer Coach CEO and Hunter College alum Lew Frankfort's recent donation of a million dollars to his alma mater.

The vitality of that counterculture--as it appears to this 29-year-old--came from the combination of youthful energy, political awareness, subversive humor, and pure, antic ingenuity. With all these elements in place, all that was needed was to find the lexicon to express their confluence, a task not too demanding for such great artists as The Rolling Stones, Jean-Luc Godard, and Thomas Pynchon. The arrival of this new lexicon could be seen in a 16-page brochure called "The South," which was part of Chwast's slideshow this morning. Each page bore an idyllic image of the Old South (a Currier Ives print, a hand-tinted movie still, etc.) disrupted by the photograph of a slain black person or civil-rights activist, the violence signified by a circular perforation in the photo. It's a striking piece of agitprop that becomes culturally revealing when one recognizes that the perforation makes each page resemble a vinyl record. At its height, the counterculture aimed to sweep away the old codes and replace them with the language they were developing and rediscovering through pop music and street-level politicking.

Carin Goldberg, who designed album art for CBS Records in the '70s, gave a much less lively historical account in her talk this morning. She seemed to believe that her audience had never seen a movie, let alone read a detailed history book. Her disquisition on Truth included thumbnail descriptions of the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s (covered in the movie Quiz Show), the oft-mocked "duck and cover" campaign, and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Even if she felt compelled to drag these punching bags out for yet another thrashing, she could have done so with a single image instead of playing the pedant. She appeared to think that we desperately needed the historical context only she could provide.

The younger design activists who took the stage after lunch used equally problematic approaches. I enjoyed listening to Scott Stowell, one of the minds behind the lauded design of Good magazine, talk about the publication's mission of reaching "people who give a damn" and watching his display of highlights from Good's inaugural year. The magazine's flaws, though, can be gleaned from its directionless title. Its mannered, jokey design, laden as it is with tics and digressions, often seems intentionally deployed to sweeten the tough topics risked in the articles. As the magazine develops, we may well see Good find a deeper, more resonant voice.

Listening to today's talks, it seemed to me that the old-school counterculture, instead of evolving, had split. Boomers kept the political awareness and oppositional craft they honed while fighting Nixon and others, but lost both the desire and the will to bring about fundamental change. Generations X and Y have desire in abundance but little awareness and discipline to guide it. Each group is left with only half a lexicon. The only subject on which everyone can be brought to agreement is George W. Bush. When he goes, assuming the Democrats prevail in the '08 election, will we all just resume our pre-millennial nap?

Sitkin's work with John Bielenberg's Project M took her and seven other designers to Hale County, Alabama for the month of June with the vague mission of creating something that would make a difference in the poorer communities there. As the group discovered, more than a quarter of the residents of Hale County live below the poverty line, and almost as many have no connection to the municipal water system. Inspired by one of Hale's local papers, the Greensboro Watchman, the team created a 24-page newspaper-style spread about the county's water-access problem in just a few days. At buyameter.org, you can view the piece and donate to a fund established to assist the needy in Hale County. It takes $425 to bring clean water to a household; so far, about $30,000 has been raised.

Andrew Sloat's shorts constitute a fun, patriotic mix of typography and cinema. He premiered a new three-minute movie (made with $3,000 of his own money) which spells out the first sentence of the preamble to the Constitution letter by letter using t-shirts worn by a multicultural group of people, who pivot and slide into various configurations in order to assemble all the words. The movie's recognizable setting--a school gymnasium--lends a plaintive note to this humorous work. It's as though the democratic principles outlined in the preamble were, like childhood memories, both almost close enough to touch and irrevocably distant.

As Alissa Walker was quick to point out, the three panelists seemed to be motivated by different forms of frustration. Fed up with the banality of the advertising world in which he made his living, Ji Lee invited the people to talk back by pasting empty voice bubbles on billboards and posters on the streets and in the subway. The "Bubble Project" phenomenon spawned a book, Talk Back: The Bubble Project, and has spread around the world via the internet, but perhaps just as rewarding was the "adrenaline rush" Lee says he got from his guerrilla activities. Andrew Sloat said his movies come out of a desire to subvert his own political stridency with a more "open-ended, sentimental" message. Ellen Sitkin felt that her day jobs in design didn't fulfill her need to explore "the human side" of the discipline. Each designer found a project suited to his or her personality, one that spoke to both overarching desires of young political artists: to do good and to be understood.

What were the reasons for the switch? What issues do you feel you were attempting to illuminate/demonstrate?
For me, the switch was really a statement that design is about the work. It was a sophisticated play on the understanding of design as that of merely a star culture – an opportunity to celebrate idea over the individual (‘the’ project as opposed to ‘my’ project). A few people in the audience knew me, but many looked at the picture of Tobi in the catalogue, that didn't know his face and assumed they had the wrong guy. I gave away MANY hints, but as I can speak with such authority, many were unable to pick them up. Hopefully they realize later...

How much preparation was necessary for you to “become” Tobi Wong?
There was really almost no preparation. Tobi and I had a long lunch. We discussed design, life, fears, hopes, relationships, etc. at length. I was really interested in what drives him, and how I could represent his ideas and stay true to his spirit. We shared much, and I learned what we share, and what we don't. I'm pretty good at modeling different perspectives. We've admired each other's work in the past, so we also shared that affinity.

What were your impressions of the experience of becoming another designer?
Empathy and role-playing is probably the most basic and important thing a designer does. As a writer, I'd imagine you're an expert at this as well. When Tobi asked me, I actually felt nervous, something I rarely feel. I can stand-up in a board room, lecture to a University, but to pretend to be another person and be able to answer questions as they would, that was a serious responsibility. I had to do it. I really enjoyed the exercise - be someone else for a day.

How do you feel it came off? Were you happy with the results?
I was nervous during the beginning of my presentation, as I was learning the slides and proper project names and dates. Tobi had just loaded them before I presented. I generally knew the work, but not the exact pictures. The results were phenomenal! I was informally interviewed by a number of magazines including Fast Company. People were convinced and enjoyed the dialogue. A number of people complimented me on my 'incredible' acting ability and asked how I could speak so well about design. I jokingly said Tobi had implanted a mic which of course was not true.

Why was there ultimately no “reveal”? Was it a spontaneous decision not to call attention to the joke?
Yes, it was a spontaneous decision not to call attention with a reveal. I looked out at Tobi sitting next to my girlfriend, and he shook his head no. I respected this. One man can only know so much, I suppose if you want to know the answer to this, you have to ask the maestro himself...

Do you think it would be fair to call the project a “prank” or a “stunt,” and why/why not?
No, it certainly wasn't a prank or a stunt. The questions were real as were my responses. I'm a serious designer, thinker and risk-taker. Maybe that's why Tobi signaled to not reveal. Suspending disbelief certainly allowed many in the audience to experience Tobi Wong. I now know a lot more about him as well as myself. It was great fun!