From: David Salanitro
Subject: Re: Are you Thinking Wrong?
Date: February 14, 2006 2:28:29 PM PST

I have, this minute, cracked open the first Think Wrong exercise. I am communicating via my Apple Power- Book G4® and a T-Mobile HotSpot® at a local Starbucks® while enjoying a Grande™ Latte and listening to Ryan Adams’ 29 (Lost Highway Records) on my iPod®. Is there a conflict of interest between STEP inside design and/or its parent Dynamic Graphics, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates and the aforementioned registered trademarks?

I want to be sure that any efforts to “think wrong” on my part do not compromise or infringe on any entity’s intellectual or tangible properties. Good thinking is safe thinking.

David Salanitro’s schedule had him concepting his cover design in dozens of Starbucks and hotel rooms and occasionally a friend’s kitchen, bouncing between California, Chicago, and New York. Due to his extenuating personal circumstances, Salanitro takes issue with the fact that the thinking wrong cap is one size fits all. “You can’t just have a process, you have to take into account the people, the clients, the designers,” he says. “You can’t just stick them in a maze and expect them to find the cheese. They might not like cheese. They might be looking for peanut butter!”

Throughout the exercises, which Salanitro prefers to call “games,” he felt like giving the conciliatory eye roll to the act of cranking out wrong ideas. “Any designer worth his salt should be able to make that leap,” he says. “Making a cover that doesn’t sell is not necessary to make a cover that does sell.” Salanitro quickly filed many of his early ideas in the category of “things that will get you fired,” including images of Paris Hilton and human excrement. He felt like he was purposely being prodded toward a filthy or shocking solution. “I couldn’t believe I was being made to go here,” he remembers thinking. “They might have to take the magazine home in a brown paper wrapper.”

One favorite idea consisted of constructing a huge organic machine, with the notorious ovipositors for mouths, a good idea for which he could come up with no execution. The final bathroom stall was a natural progression of thoughts that he gathered throughout the process: Pairing his early human excrement explorations with the thoughts of “STEP-ping” in it yielded an obvious concept that begged to be illustrated.

The image is a little expected, he admits, and he thinks the type should be etched into the surface of the magazine like bathroom graffiti. But it does convey his experience with the process. “I don’t think it’s where people do their best thinking,” he laughs. “But it’s somewhere equated with doing your best thinking.”

RIGHT OR WRONG?
“In his notes you can see that he goes through a brainstorming process from the exercises, but whether he would have gotten to the cover he selected without the exercises or not, I’m not sure,” says Bielenberg. “If you had said to him, ‘Do a cover on design thinking,’ it’s possible he would have come up with that idea. I think he engaged and it’s a good solution, and it ended up in a good place.”