The world reached out for the comfort of connection after the tragedy of 9/11: We had never known such collective grief. Within days, graphic designer and lifelong New Yorker Milton Glaser delivered solace to a world in shock by creating his artful declaration “I Love New York More Than Ever.” He enlisted the help of the School for Visual Arts to print a poster. Assisted by friends and colleagues, he broadcast his message in the media. His image of the singed heart was instantly and eagerly embraced by a paralyzed world. Glaser, who also designed the graphic identity for Windows on the World (the legendary restaurant high atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center) says, “It was like someone you knew died and now they are gone and you realize how much you cared about them.”

Once before, in the bankrupt ’70s, Glaser had donated his talent to help New Yorkers rejuvenate. He recalls, “Morale was at the bottom of the pit. I always say you could tell by the amount of dog shit in the street. There was so much dog shit because people didn’t feel that they deserved anything else, right? I mean you were just walking through all this dog shit day after day, in this filthy city, garbage, and so on. And then the most extraordinary thing happened: There was a shift in sensibility. One day people said, ‘I’m tired of stepping in dog shit. Get this fucking stuff out of my way.’ And the city began to react. They said, ‘If you allow your dog to crap on the street, you have to pay a fine of $100’ and within a very short time it became socially untenable to allow your dog to shit on the street. I don’t know what produces those behavioral shifts. From one day where it’s OK, and then suddenly the city simultane­ously got fed up and said, ‘It’s our city, we’re going to take it back, we’re not going to allow this stuff to happen.’ And part of that moment was the campaign, ‘I Love New York.’ More than anything else it was a device to encourage tourism.”¹

Like many major cities, New York relies on visitors for revenue—and it relies on visitors to spread the good word about the city’s offerings. So much has changed since those bad old days. Tenyears after 9/11 and 35 years after the start of the statewide “I Love New York” campaign 51 million tourists visited the clean, green streets of the city’s 5 boroughs, spending 34 billion dollars in its hotels, restaurants, institutions and retail stores. Once again New York has become one of the top tourist destinations in the world.

But Glaser’s “I Love New York” (a gift to New York State) didn’t just help New York rebound: This pride-of-place concept helped many cities, eventually spinning way out of control with kitschy clichés of love for just about everything—from “I Love Jesus” to “I Love Mustaches” to “I Love Porn.” But iron­ically it was the original, the ubiquitous 1976 “I Love New York” rebus that prepared the world to instantane­ously embrace “I Love New York More Than Ever” at its moment of need.

As effective conveyors of ideas, designers draw people into dia­logue. The power of design, when mindfully and powerfully applied, can reconfirm or disrupt or challenge belief systems. It can open people to ways that might improve the world for everyone. Glaser adds, “But the design must be insight­ful. Arresting. It must challenge the existing condition of the mind by offering an alternative.”

CRISIS CREATES COOPERATIVESWhen balanced on the edge of a precipice, one may consider more radical solutions: Do or die. For instance, a housing cooperative affectionately known as The Coops, formed in the 1920s in the Bronx. It was built by Russian Jews, Communists and Trotskyites, many who had immigrated from war-torn Europe now desperate to relocate from the squalid conditions of New York City’s Lower East Side. So 700 families pooled their money to build a new home together, a utopia. Members of The Coops called themselves “cooperators.” Their mindset was unity within community. The Coops housing com­plex, designed by a progressive architecture firm, featured spacious apartments, large open communal areas, a gymnasium and library. There was a child of working-class immi­grant parents from Transylvania raised in The Coops, a genius child who would grow up to revolutionize graphic design and illus­tration—a cooper­ator named Milton Glaser.

CO-OPS SOLVE PROBLEMS The cooperative movement is designed to provide resolutions for pressing social dilemmas. It’s now a multi-billion dollar inter­national industry. A fire insurance co-op was started by Benjamin Franklin with firefighters in 1752 in Philadelphia (it’s the oldest co-op in the US). There are divorced and widowed women’s worker co-ops in Morocco (where such women are often disowned). Gas co-ops (Canada). Rat catchers co-ops (India). Beekeepers co-ops (Chicago). Consumer co-ops (Japan). Daycare and food co-ops and credit unions, which are essentially co-ops, dot the map.

Most early cooperatives started as small grassroots organizations in Western Europe, North America and Japan. In 1844 a group of thirty artisans working in the cotton mills in Northern England faced miserable conditions: They could not afford the high price of food and household goods. By pooling their scarce resources—one pound sterling each—they purchased basic goods at lower prices and opened a shop. These weavers formed a co-op, the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society. The Pioneers decided it was high time shoppers were treated with honesty, openness, respect while shar­ing in the profits. Every customer in the shop would become a member with a true stake in the business. They should have a say in their business, follow the principles of democracy. Today, the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society is The Cooperative Group with 3 million members and 125,000 employees all of whom embrace the Pioneers’ model. By 2010 they had revenue of over twelve billion pounds and expanded their benefits to include healthcare, travel and automotives. They get involved in issues like climate change and human rights and because of their huge size, they have influence. One hundred and fifty years later, the Rochdale Principles remain the basis for a modern cooperative movement and it has spread around the world.²

FOOD CRISIS IN MY BACKYARDConditions for change are often created by crisis. In 2007 my area of Brooklyn was considered a food desert (i.e., no good affordable sources for food). A reporter was looking for a story for her local paper. Any story. She needed to fill space. I said, quite off­handedly, “What if we had a food co-op here?” She loved that idea. Of course no one was organizing a co-op (which I quickly added), but I’d been studying the concept of cooperatives and I was a new mem­ber of the legendary Park Slope Food Co-op (PSFC) with 16,000 members, 65 employees and annual revenue of over 44 million dollars. I was entranced by the spirit of cooperation in the store, learning how and why the worker co-op (as opposed to non-work­ing member) model was essential: Anyone can join but to share in the benefits, they have to also work a shift. Like the Cooperative Group, everyone benefits from the cost savings, high-quality goods and camaraderie. Everyone has a say.

I figured if anyone was going to start a new food co-op, they’d have to first confirm the climate was right for one here. A local article could provide that barometer. I figured, “Maybe some people will surface who want to take this on.” The reporter interviewed Kathryn Zarczynski (a friend I roped in) and me. They took a photo of the two of us juggling fruit in my kitchen. The story led with, “Fort Greene and Clinton Hill foodies are contemplating the organic crime of the century: They’re considering starting a rival version of the Park Slope Food Co-op.” OK so the reporter missed the point, the cooperative message, but regardless, the article went viral. Within 3 months, 900 neighbors had signed an online petition (started by 2 young techies). PSFC wholeheartedly supported us. We were holding regular open meetings at a local church. I say “we” because “the people who might surface to take this on” turned out to be Kathryn and me.

We were starting a grocery store with hundreds of our neighbors and it was as stressful as it was joyful. Several neighbors stepped up immediately to help organize. We established metrics includ­ing guiding principles, committees, bylaws. We surveyed. We debated all this plus much more while sitting in open meet­ings held in a circle. Random people would show up to one meeting, new people for the next. Eventually we decided all who showed up would be considered members since we needed to vote to go forward. Our website was a wiki, our discussions and process egalitarian, transparent, thoroughly engaging and respectful. Our votes were and continue to be almost entirely unanimous and positive. We voted on a criteria for a name: it must be memorable and reflect our neighborhoods. Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. It should be short, not initialized, positive in its visual imagery and distinctive from other food businesses. This led us to the name the Greene Hill Food Co-op. But at the beginning Greene Hill (a name that conjured up a very idealistic, environ­mental and positive visual) was far more virtual than tangible and many early hard-working “members” had to move on unable to wait for it to become real (or fail in the trying).

DESIGN BY COMMITTEENow we needed a well-designed brand identity system—and to use a cooperative process to get there, the kind that designers typi­cally hate: We needed to vote on a logo. Miraculously Geoff Cook, a new neighbor, happened into a general meeting where I was having this very thought in the most intense way. A partner of the international design firm Base Design, Cook volunteered his team’s expertise and time to develop our brand design. He became co-chair of the branding committee with me. I established a research pro­cess that started with surveys of the “membership” that probed how we wanted the co-op to look and feel. Then using an agreed-upon criteria, I worked with Base Design on three possible direc­tions that we presented at a general meeting along with a ration­ale based on the research and the co-op’s agreed-upon guiding princi­ples.³ We included visuals of different types of stores we wanted to differentiate from or be inspired by. The general membership had strong visceral and pragmatic responses to all this. We took it all in. Base Design came up with an entirely new direction and the new system was approved in a stunning, unani­mous vote. Many of our non-design members stood agape, “We already look suc­ces­s­ful!” Like a million-dollar operation, yet we had not dollar one in the bank nor would we open our store for two more years.

In October 2012 due to all of our cumulative effort and persistence, we had a 2,700 square-foot-store and 1,200 members proving that by everyone doing their bit, everyone can share equally.

PEER-TO-PEER NETWORKS Our homo sapien genes evolved during a few Ice Ages, global famines, the invasion of the Mongols, the Black Plague, the Inqui­sition and World Wars I and II by adapting to often-rapid change. This would be a clue that, by cooperating, we can make it through a few more catas­tro­phes. Early cultures created peer-to-peer net­works (where everyone is part of a dynamic collective focused on the good of the tribe).

Modern peer-to-peer networks, called P2P, are very different and virtual. They help improve our ability to problem solve in real-time, evolve an indi­vidual’s critical and creative thinking and intelligence by present­ing tasks that we’ve never had to solve before and often doing this with people unlike us. This provides an additional bene­fit: By doing some­thing new and differ­ent, we build new memory stores and neural path­ways and that improves our brains.

We are comfortable with P2P networks and they have become ubiquitous. Wikipedia, Kickstarter, Brickstarter, Open311, Code­forAmerica, NextDoor and Neighborland are some of the myriad virtual ways people work cooperatively and non-hierarchically now. We self-organize, often work on a volunteer basis with others—as a public service and with limited oversight (if any) from an authority figure. New tech­nology, since it allows for decentral­­ized participation, is the master key unlocking these new doors. You can collaborate across continents without ever leaving the comfort of your living room. You can work with people you’ll never see or meet.

We create the technology we need, not the other way around. We needed to be able to cook food and we figured out the technology to create fire. We needed to communicate over thousands of miles instantly, we demanded that technology. We need to live together so we are creating the technology that allows for democracy.

THE CASE FOR DEMOCRACYTwo-thirds of the planet lives under democracy, which (hypo­thetically) decentralizes power. America is arguably the best of the worst. Theory says two percent of humans are thirsty for power. One to three percent are sociopathic, lack empathy, or are psychopathic. So even if only a few of the people who seek power have that combo we are in deep trouble if our society is ill-equip­ped to tell the difference. Think Adolph Hitler, Bernard Madoff, Muammar Gaddaffi. A now classic Yale study showed that when a man wearing a uniform (an authority figure) told a volunteer subject to deliver a lethal shock to a person (an actor in the next room), 60–70 percent of subjects would resist, have stress reac­tions but would ultimately comply if told “you have to do this.” When the uniform was stripped away, the subjects refused.⁴

Many, if not most, inventions are developed by the simple futzing around of an individual or small group. Since there is no “one way” to do things in anti-authoritarian America, this process can get muddled. It can result in endless debate and inaction within even the most cooperative of groups. This is particularly manifest since our universal values are ultimately often left up to individual interpretation. The really bad news is that so many citizens are not up to the challenge of sorting out the muddle, are not inquisi­tive, have limited educational experiences to bolster them, and/or are often under informed.

LEAVING YOUR COMFORT ZONEFew of us popped out of the womb geniuses. It takes hard work and the will to learn from repeated failures to develop genius even if you start off with a big brain. Persistence in many ways is more impor­tant than talent or intelligence: trying a new path when one doesn’t pan out, not being intimidated or defeated when at first you don’t succeed. Many people, even smart people, miss their potential by getting into a rut, stuck in a dead-end mindset. Squirrels and chimps don’t innovate. They don’t have the brain power to plan like humans, to experiment, dare to try something untested. And they only know how to do things “one way” that locks them in a holding pattern.

Barack Obama learned some hard lessons in his first term as Presi­dent. And so did we. It doesn’t matter how much of a genius Obama is or how much power he has. He needs us to push back, to speak out, experiment and to see ourselves as responsible mem­bers of this giant cooperative, the US of A. He is still a community organizer, we are the community.

DO UNTO OTHERS WHAT THEY WANT DONE TO THEMJerry and Monique Sternin futzed around, studying malnutrition in an impoverished village in Vietnam in the 1990s. And in that process they tried something new.⁵ They looked for the outliers—those few families who looked healthy. They analyzed the ingredi­ents they subsisted on which differed substantially from that of the other families. The Sternins held a party and invited the entire village to make a big feast together asking the villagers to bring the nutritional ingredients they identified to the feast to cook. The Sternins could have simply imposed a new diet on the village. Or they could have relied on the leaders of the community to tell them what the problem was. Instead, as the cliché goes, they looked for the solution in the problem. The village enjoyed the feast of their own making. They changed their diet. Malnu­trition fell by 85 percent over 2 years. It took a village. It still takes a village, many, many villages, and many open-hearted, thoughtful cooperators like the Sternins, like Milton Glaser, like Barack Obama. We can learn from each other. We are going in the right direction if you look at the larger picture and see yourself in it: It’s all about me and it’s all about we. ca

_{Notes
1.   “Chip Kidd talks with Milton Glaser,” the Believer, September 2003.
2.    www.co-operative.coop
3.    www.greenehillfood.coop/about
4.    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
5.    www.positivedeviance.org}