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This is a story of innovation, a brief case history of helping make The Coca-Cola Company a powerful source for change.

It begins with an empty plastic Coca-Cola bottle – rather with billions of empty plastic Coca-Cola bottles. We live in an era where it is difficult to hide or erase anything.

Building on Bruce’s relationship with company leadership, we went beneath the surface to re-imagine and re-engineer the hidden systems behind cultural, economic and environmental structures. As is often the case, the biggest opportunity was found in the details of the mundane.

We designed “Live Positively,” a sustainability platform and a new brand icon for The Coca-Cola Company, its first in a long while. It put to work Bruce’s premise that “the power of markets, brought to bear on the world’s real problems, is the power to change the world.”

Designing an image of a positive future helped to focus resolve, within the brand culture and with consumers and potential partners – in this case, American chair manufacturer Emeco, the creator of the nearly indestructible Navy Chair of the Second World War that is still selling well today.

Under the banner of Refresh, Recycle, Reuse, we took an empowering – not a scolding – approach to upcycling Coca-Cola consumer waste into a sustainable, timeless chair, the 111 Navy Chair.

“When you recycle a plastic Coca-Cola bottle, you’re doing something good,” Bruce said. “When you recycle 111 of them into a cool chair, you’re doing something great. Help your bottle become something extraordinary again.”

We designed the potential for Coca-Cola to take a leadership role in a powerful worldwide social movement that evolved from removing tens of millions of PET bottles from the waste stream to taking the initiative on water issues and women’s entrepreneurship.

Communicate through actions: this is a case of MCN maximalism creating more of the Coca-Cola experience we love, using less of what we need.

The real purpose of education is to deliver an experience. The IwB is designed as a collaborative pedagogy that produces entrepreneurial designers capable of constant learning.

The entrepreneurial learning method is simple: we take on a very difficult project on a very public stage, and we tackle it together as a renaissance team. In a typical learning experience, the teacher doles out one small piece of information after another. The IwB instead works by inspiring. The teacher admits, “I don’t know the answers, we’ll search for them together.” The first project of the IwB was the Massive Change exhibition. Fifteen IwB students spent a full year working with me in my studio and became co-authors of the project.

British historian Arnold Toynbee said, “The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as the era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.”

When I read Toynbee’s quote, I thought, “Well that’s the biggest idea I’ve ever heard, and it’s certainly what I’m committed to. It’s what many people I know are committed to.” The phrase ”practical objective” makes the welfare of the whole human race a design problem, not a utopian vision.

Designers have the ability to see the world in a different way, to see the future with practical optimism. On every level, they are thinking about how to remake our world. The biggest leap in Massive Change was to be positive and optimistic when the rest of the world was feeling that we’re going to hell in a handbasket.