Clever with Amy Devers

Furniture designer Maximilian Eicke grew up being schlepped around the world to galleries and and antiques shops by his art dealer father. All that input served to make him feel at home anywhere in t…

Architect Barbara Bestor’s childhood memories involve Brutalist architecture and purple carpeted stairs. She divided her youth between the East Coast, Germany and the Midwest, before venturing to Los…

Industrial designer Ti Chang is co-founder and creative director of Crave, a start-up dedicated to innovative and elevated sex toys. Originally from Taiwan, as a child Ti moved with her family to the…

We teamed up with Tarkett for this Clever Extra to take a deep dive into Neoculture - a term coined to describe the way diverse cultures are coming together as never before to create entirely new cul…

President and Creative Director of Bernhardt Design, Jerry Helling, grew up on a ranch in a remote town with 11 people in his graduating class before venturing to USC and a potential career in Hollyw…

Fashion journalist and design retailer Rose Apodaca wears many professional hats. She spent her youth immersed in the lively Los Angeles music and skateboarding scenes, then became a journalist cover…

Eric Quint, Chief Design Officer of 3M, incubated a lifelong habit of design thinking in youth at the family kitchen table. After studying engineering and industrial design he embarked on a distingui…

Product designer and installation artist, Nika Zupanc, has always had a strong emotional reaction to furniture, both positive and negative. Born and raised in former Yugoslavia, she was attracted at …

Car designer Oliver Heilmer has known he wanted to go into auto design since he was a little kid fascinated by tractors on his grandmother’s farm. He grew up in Munich, Germany drawing machines and v…

Metalworker and designer Meyghan Hill tells us how she opted to send herself to military boarding school and then stumbled into a modeling career before empowering herself after a bad break-up by lea…

Strategic designer Todd Bracher regales us with tales of a serendipitous ten-year journey, living, loving and learning through Europe, on the way to launching his namesake studio in Brooklyn. Plus, h…

Collector and high-design advocate, Lisa Roberts, reflects on a childhood spent in an architecturally significant home that discomfited her because it made her feel different from her peers, and also…

Designer, illustrator and artist Timothy Goodman was labeled a “dead-end kid” in his youth until he did four years of hard labor with a mentor/father-figure in the home improvement industry, through …

Entrepreneur and internet pioneer, Jen Bekman, tells the story of how she founded 20x200 with a mission of making art collecting accessible to everyone. On the leading edge of ecommerce, 20x200 achie…

Airbnb co-founder & CPO, Joe Gebbia, was known as the “art guy” in grade school when he started his first business selling illustrations of Ninja Turtles. Then, while pursuing dual design degrees, he…

Fashion designer Mary Ping was influenced at a young age by a stylish grandmother who taught her to sew. Always knowing she’d one day run her own label, she studied art at Vassar and worked in east L…

We teamed up with Interface for this Clever Extra to dissect and reflect on the current office renaissance. It’s moving away from one-size-fits all toward addressing the needs, rhythms and health of …

International design star, Marcel Wanders, grew up in the Netherlands taking things apart and making gifts from the pieces. After a rebellious and experimental adolescence, he discovered design in sc…

MoMA’s senior curator of Architecture & Design, Paola Antonelli, grew up steeped in the design culture of Milan and developed a sense of fearlessness from frequent travels to foreign lands. After stu…

Product designer Ini Archibong grew up taking things apart with little success putting them back together, and cutting class to throw pottery. After a false-start in business school, he taught himsel…