Last week, Miki Agrawal and Céline Semaan Vernon sat before a roomful of aspiring and active designers to talk about the future of social- and environmentally-minded design.
Mr. Behrooz said the town missed a chance to build a town hall on the forefront of contemporary and ecology-minded design.
Hiring Mr. Wang, 29, a designer who has built a successful business based on commercially appealing contemporary clothes, rather than high-minded design, was a risk, as even Mr. Pinault has acknowledged.
Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter.
(Frank Stella's insolently literal-minded designs on blocky stretchers were the height of sophisticated taste back then; their emotional numbness has consigned them, in retrospect, to period décor).
Dorm rooms are usually not the stuff of Elle Decor -- so Gigi, an 18-year-old college student and design aficionado, took to Tumblr to create the bedrooms of her dreams and share them with like-minded design-lovers.
Since its first issue in 2008 the nonprofit Triple Canopy has been a high-minded, high-design artifact, with writers and art directors from Harper's and Artforum and a sharp, scholarly wit.
The cooperative, a stop on the tour and part of Village Homes, a pioneering ecology-minded subdivision designed in the 1970s, includes a community orchard where residents pick figs, apricots, persimmons and pistachios.
But now the chain is hoping to revive the spirit of Roddick, who died in 2007, with environmental and community-minded initiatives designed to put it back at the forefront of ethical business.
