The path to the invention of the wah-wah pedal — which lets an electric guitar take on aspects of the human voice — shows the twists and turns of the creative process.

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in the New York Times on August 7, 2011

DEL CASHER has done a lot of impressive things with his guitar over the last 50 years. He has performed with Gene Autry, Lawrence Welk, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He’s appeared, strumming, in movies with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. He’s been a featured player on dozens of film and TV soundtracks.

But there is one accomplishment that Mr. Casher, now 73, wishes more people knew about: his role in the invention of the wah-wah pedal.

The story of this device, which enables an electric guitar to take on aspects of the human voice — and which helped define the sounds of rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton — is complicated. But that very complexity drives home a point: While it is easier — and more romantic — to talk about innovation as the domain of lone inventors who hit pay dirt while tinkering in solitude, creativity is more often than not a collaborative, and messy, affair. As such, Mr. Casher’s story seems an apt one to tell in this, my last Prototype column.

“There’s a lot of players in this whole thing,” and a brilliant engineer named Brad Plunkett was one of them, says Mr. Casher, who is based in Los Angeles. “But I’m the one who said, ‘This is a guitar thing!’ ”

As a studio player in the 1960s, Mr. Casher was always looking for effects and techniques that would set his guitar solos apart. He admired the bluesy tones that the trumpet and trombone players emitted, with the help of wah-wah mutes, on “Rhapsody in Blue,” George Gershwin’s 1924 classic, but couldn’t figure out how to imitate them on the electric guitar.

The Thomas Organ company had acquired the rights to distribute Vox amplifiers — a British brand that the Beatles helped to make famous. To promote their venture, Thomas Organ formed the Vox Ampliphonic Orchestra, and Mr. Casher was invited to join. That put him on the premises of the company’s headquarters in Sepulveda, Calif., when its engineers began working to modify the amplifiers into solid state, translating all the tube circuits into transistors. As they did so, they ran across a switch known as a midrange boost, or M.R.B. for short.

“They said, ‘What the heck is this?’ ” Mr. Casher recalls of the M.R.B., which used different frequencies to make certain sounds seem louder. The feature — a switch that musicians clicked — had been invented by Dick Denney, a British engineer and guitarist. “If you really want to say who was the grandfather of the wah-wah,” Mr. Casher says, “it was Dick Denney.”

When Joe Benaron, the chairman of Thomas Organ, found out that installing that same switch in the United States would cost almost $3 a unit, he balked. So the chief engineer, Stan Cuttler assigned a young colleague, Mr. Plunkett, to solve the problem. He did so by replacing the switch with a 75-cent knob much like those used for volume control. Soon afterward, at a Vox Ampliphonic Orchestra rehearsal, Mr. Casher first encountered the device.

“I said, ‘What’s this knob?’ And I’m flipping it around and noticing it’s going wah-wah as I went from left to right,” he recalls. “I said: ‘Hold on! This is what I’ve been looking for!’ ”

But guitars take two hands to play — you can’t be fiddling with knobs during a solo. So Mr. Casher says he asked Mr. Plunkett whether the knob could be put into a pedal instead. In at least one interview, however, Mr. Plunkett has said that this was his own idea. (I could not reach Mr. Plunkett for comment.)

“With anything like this, mysteries abound about who did what when,” says Art Thompson, a senior editor at Guitar Player magazine who has looked into the history of what he refers to simply as “the wah.” But he says that while it’s impossible to know exactly who played what role, it would make sense that Mr. Casher could have participated: “When a musical instrument device is transitioning from the lab to market, there’s always a player who’s involved.”

A sculptor and a lighting artist have very different techniques but the same goal: to promote understanding by finding new ways of seeing the world.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in the New York Times, July 10, 2011

Nathalie Miebach's Antarctic Explorer

NATHALIE MIEBACH uses science to make art. A sculptor who lives in Brookline, Mass., she translates weather data and other scientific measurements into three-dimensional objects that accurately display temperature variations, barometric pressure and moon phases, among other things.

Matthew McCrory, on the other hand, uses art to benefit science. A former lighting artist at DreamWorks Animation, he now uses his skills at the Center for Advanced Molecular Imaging at Northwestern University to help researchers in Chicago see their work in 3-D.

Ms. Miebach and Mr. McCrory may appear to be engaged in very different pursuits, but their goal is the same: to promote understanding by finding new ways of seeing the world. They’ve never met, but both are invested in the idea that better visualization leads to better thinking.

“You make discoveries much quicker when you have a different way of viewing your data,” says Mr. McCrory, whose official title is lead visualization engineer. “And your brain doesn’t have to work as hard to try to figure out what things are really like.”

Both have been in the news of late. In March, Northwestern unveiled what it calls a classroom unlike any other: a room that Mr. McCrory designed and outfitted with 46-inch televisions — 25 of them, stacked five by five — that operate as a huge, high-resolution canvas upon which atoms, proteins and even whole animals can be displayed in all their three-dimensional glory.

For her part, Ms. Miebach was named one of 20 fellows who will participate in the annual TEDGlobal conference, which promotes the convergence of technology, entertainment and design.

Before she headed to Edinburgh, where this year’s conference convenes on Monday, she spent some time with me on the phone describing her work. She said her sculptures, while representations of meticulously gathered data, seek less to teach viewers explicitly about science than to make them think about how they think.

“The purpose of these pieces is not a didactic one: to explain a specific act of weather or climate change,” she says. “It really is to reveal the beauty of complexity. The work addresses broader questions than the numbers I’m translating. It forces the viewer to think about the visual vocabulary they associate with science versus art.”

That phrase “science versus art” could be an accurate summary of Mr. McCrory’s work, too. While getting his bachelor’s degree in computer science (and for some time after he graduated), he was a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, doing software development and design for visualization devices. Then he spent a year as a lighting technical director at DreamWorks, working on the movie “Shark Tale.” Then he toggled back again, working at the University of Chicago on visualizing of CAT scans and M.R.I.’s for surgeons. Then he returned to DreamWorks for a few more years, working on “Flushed Away” and “Kung Fu Panda.”

With each job change, he kept returning to a single frustration: “the trailing gap between what was coming out of Hollywood visually and what was coming out of the scientific realm.”

“The scientists at Northwestern do physics, chemistry and biology really well, but they generally don’t have a clue when it comes to making good-looking images,” he said. “A lot was getting lost in translation.”

So when he had a chance to join the university’s information technology wing to try to correct that problem, he jumped at it.

His first assignment was in the astronomy department, visualizing the evolution of binary star systems. Then he reconnected with one of the professors who’d helped recruit him, Thomas J. Meade, who was in the midst of designing the Center for Advanced Molecular Imaging, with the goal of having biologists, chemists, engineers and theoreticians work together. Mr. McCrory’s dream of creating a 3-D display for scientific data fit directly into Dr. Meade’s vision.

“I said: ‘I don’t care what it costs. We’ve got to do this,’ ” Dr. Meade said of that $350,000 project. He hasn’t been disappointed. “If we put glasses on you and display a rabbit brain on the screens,” he said, “you’re no longer looking at it, you’re walking around in it.”

Edison Nation, the Big Idea Group and other companies are bringing the inventions of regular people to market.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in the New York Times, June 12, 2011

BETSY RAVREBY KAUFMAN is a lot of things — a freelance television producer, a former anchor, a wife and mother, a resident of Houston. One thing she is not, she insists, is an inventor.

“Let’s get that on the table right now,” she says. Which is why it’s so crazy — that’s her word — that an idea that popped into her head one morning as she stood boiling eggs in her kitchen has led to her name being on a patent.

“If I’d made a list a year and a half ago of 100 things that could happen to me, this wouldn’t have made the list,” Ms. Kaufman says. Her daydream inspired a product called Eggies, which allows chefs to boil eggs in a classic hard-boiled shape but without their shell on. “I would have had a better chance — being old with no singing voice — winning ‘American Idol.’ ”

Ms. Kaufman, who is 56, is hardly old. In fact, some say she’s a child — a poster child for a new movement of amateur noodlers whose brainstorms are finding their way to market through partnerships with companies that seek out people just like them: folks with inspiration, but no business expertise.

“We focus on the people who have great ideas but want to keep their day job,” says Louis Foreman, the chief executive of Edison Nation, the company in Charlotte, N.C., that teamed up with Ms. Kaufman. “We’ll never compete with the people who are hard-wired to go out and start their own business — and we don’t want to.” But risk-averse people have eureka moments, too, he says. And that’s Edison Nation’s sweet spot.

“We have lots of fuel to turn a spark into a fire. But sometimes that spark is elusive,” says Mr. Foreman, who says his company splits all revenue with its inventors. “There’s no hold-back. If a dollar comes in, 50 cents goes to the inventor, 50 cents to us. It’s a transparent process.”

Edison Nation is just one of several so-called open innovation companies that seek to encourage creativity and share in the profits when that creativity strikes pay dirt. The Big Idea Group in Bedford, N.H., for example, is known for toys and craft products, among other things; Inno-Labs in Winfield, Kan., has helped develop a flexible grilling skewer, the FireWire. Add to this the several innovation-seeking sites run by big corporations — InnovateWithKraft.com, CloroxConnects.com and Procter & Gamble’s Connect + Develop — and you get a lot of places for non-pro tinkerers to turn for help.

Edison Nation, however, has a leg up on its competition because it is run by the same people who produce the reality TV show “Everyday Edisons,” which appears on PBS. That program, now in its fourth season, got its start after Mr. Foreman complained to his wife, who is an avid reality TV fan, that there were shows about dancers, singers and survivors, but not inventors. “Everyday Edisons” has a loyal following.

Mr. Foreman and his four partners also run a product design firm called Enventys. Some of the products they have developed were discovered on the show, like the Gyro Bowl, a spill-resistant “kid proof” dish that stays open side up no matter how you tip it. Another product that got its start on PBS is the Emery Cat, a scratching board that lets your feline “trim its own nails” by doing what comes naturally: clawing.

But as they completed the show’s early episodes, Mr. Foreman said, he and his partners realized there were a lot more marketable ideas out there than the show could highlight.

“If we looked at 15,000 ideas and chose 10, it didn’t mean that idea No. 11 through 99 weren’t great; it just meant we only had enough bandwidth on the TV show to develop 10,” he says. With the Web site Edison Nation, which they started last year to cast a wider net, “there’s no limit to the number of winners.”

Expanding on their grandfather’s ideas, two brothers have created the Sporting-Sail, which lets skateboarders harness the wind to decelerate on steep terrain.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in the New York Times May 15, 2011

DOES inventiveness run in families? Is there a gene that awakens the entrepreneurial urge? A look at the Smith family offers at least anecdotal evidence that the answer is yes.

Nick and Billy Smith, California-born brothers, grew up admiring the derring-do of their father’s father, a mechanical engineer and sometime race-car driver named H. W. Smith Jr. — or Bill to his friends.

“He was all about having a good time — still is,” says Nick, 22. That’s why, in 2006 on a visit to their grandfather’s ski cabin in Vail, Colo., the brothers were drawn to its dusty attic. They were certain they would find something fun to do there. “We were looking for schnapps or fireworks, one of the two,” Nick says.

“I think it was both,” says Billy, 26.

Instead, poking around, the Smith brothers found a crate filled with 24 cardboard boxes, each about the size of a travel umbrella. A drawing on every box showed a man on skis, a parachutelike sail attached to his wrists and legs. Ski-Klipper, the label said.

The boys hurried downstairs, demanding to know what they had found. Capes? Kites?

“Our grandfather just said: ‘Put them on. They’re a lot of fun,’ “ Billy says.

Flash forward to April 6, 2010, when the brothers received a patent for something they call the Sporting-Sail. It has almost the same design their grandfather created in the late 1960s — and quickly abandoned, he says, because he was too busy — but is made from modern materials. And the product — which lets users harness the wind to decelerate on steep inclines — is not just for skiers any more.

“There are more kids skateboarding today than playing Little League baseball,” Nick says, explaining the modern need that inspired their company, called Sukräfte — a melding of the words “surf” and “skate.” As he put it, there are 18.5 million skateboarders worldwide, “and not a single efficient braking system on the market — ka-ching!”

Billy Smith works as a wet-suit designer at Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company, when he is not tending to their start-up business. He recalls a childhood in which the two brothers puttered in the family garage in Mill Valley, Calif.

“The garage was the base,” he says, recalling how he created bags from recycled materials as a teenager while his brother shaped surfboards and skateboards. “Sewing machines to screwdrivers. We had it all: Fiberglas, Kevlar, carbon fiber, rubber scraps.”

Nick says, “The garage was the think tank.” He graduated on Friday with a bachelor’s degree from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

The brothers’ mother, Brigitte Smith, is an architect, and their father, Bill Smith III, is a landscape architect. The sons credit their parents along with their grandfather with encouraging their creativity by setting an example.

“Reinvent the descent” is the marketing slogan the brothers coined for their product, which costs $79 and comes with a lifetime guarantee. But the principle that guides the company is best articulated in this description on their Web site, sporting-sails.com: “A Downhill and Downwind Friend and Family Tradition.”

From his home in upstate New York, H. W. Smith Jr., now 83, says he based his Ski-Klipper on a contraption he saw while skiing in Europe in the ‘60s. “I love deep and steep, but sometimes it’s a little steeper than I’d rather,” he says. “But with the sail I could do some pretty darn steep places.”

Mr. Smith, who signs his e-mail “Bill, the OLD OLD man,” has nevertheless already enjoyed 39 days of skiing this year. He says that growing up in Cooperstown, N.Y., he was always inventing things. “I had a science club I belonged to,” he says. “You couldn’t do this today, but we made bombs and huge hot-air balloons that you could let go.”

Later, that tinkering spirit led him to be a co-founder of what is now McLaren Performance Technologies, a Detroit-area company that, among other things, builds engines and drive trains for automakers. He says his Ski-Klipper side venture, developed on a lark, stalled when one Vail ski resort prohibited the use of hang gliders and his product.

CherryCard Pairs Charitable Giving with Everyday Purchases

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared the The New York Times, April 17, 2011

IN February, Noah Fradin turned 18 — finally. It’s a relief, he says, that he no longer needs his mom to co-sign the nondisclosure agreements and other documents related to his plan to change the world.

Mr. Fradin, a high school senior and budding entrepreneur who lives in Studio City, Calif., is the creator of CherryCard.org, a new Internet start-up that seeks to make it easy for consumers to give money to the charities of their choice.

Last week marked CherryCard’s soft launch — very soft, because Mr. Fradin is still lining up retailers to participate. As of this weekend, thanks to a group of sponsors that include NBC Universal and the Milwaukee Brewers, anyone who visits the site will be given 25 cents to spend for a cause. But the underlying mechanism of the venture — retailers distributing CherryCard vouchers that customers can redeem and donate to charity — has yet to materialize.

“It’s a chicken and egg thing,” Mr. Fradin says, referring to his simultaneous need to attract consumers to use the site and retailers to pass out vouchers. While he believes his youth is an asset, not everyone he has approached sees it that way.

“One business owner said, ‘I just don’t see any big retailer wanting to take the chance on an 18-year-old kid,’ ” Mr. Fradin recalls. “But who better to get people excited about something than kids? We’re excited about everything!”

Over the last year or so, Prototype has featured many a creative company and the adults who run them. This month, we lower the median age significantly with Mr. Fradin, who lives at home with his parents and younger brother and will be attending Brown University in the fall (one of his application essays was about pirates).

Why should we care about rookie entrepreneurs like him? Steve Mariotti, the founder of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, says they aren’t just inspiring — they’re essential. “Since all net new jobs over the last 30 years have come from start-ups, we’d better be seeing young people willing to take these risks,” he says, adding that the Internet is an especially powerful tool for them. “They have an intuitive understanding of how social media has changed marketing and branding.”

Here’s how CherryCard works: Participating retailers will hand out business-card-size vouchers to their customers after a purchase. “Redeem this card at CherryCard.org to give $0.25 to the cause of your choice,” reads a typical card, which is printed with a code.

Later, after a consumer logs in to the CherryCard site via Facebook and types in that code, the card’s monetary value is deposited in their account, which they can draw upon to give to charities (which are not charged to be listed on the site). Right now there are 35 charities, and Mr. Fradin hopes to add many more.

So who pays? The retailers do — a minimal fee per card goes to CherryCard (though Mr. Fradin is waiving it at the moment to encourage companies to sign on). When a consumer redeems a card, the retailer who distributed it is also charged its face value.

Mr. Fradin believes CherryCard can be financed out of retailers’ marketing budgets because it identifies them as socially conscious enterprises. Their logo will appear on the CherryCard site and will pop up on consumers’ Facebook pages when they donate.

“It’ll say, ‘I’ve given this amount to World Wide Fund for Nature courtesy of’ all the different places you’ve gotten the cards,” Mr. Fradin says.

Mr. Fradin has been fascinated by business since he was 9 and his grandfather, an accounting professor, taught him about the stock market. He counts Warren Buffett and Blake Mycoskie, the founder of Toms Shoes, among his idols and likes to quote Arianna Huffington on cause-based marketing (when he isn’t making a reference to the Swedish data guru Hans Rosling).

Mr. Fradin has spent about $2,000 of his own money on the CherryCard project, but he needed more than money to make it a reality. The Internet connected him with two other teenagers who helped him develop the site. He found 18-year-old Kris Mendoza, a graphic designer who lives in Lynnwood, Wash., (and is headed to Western Washington University in the fall) on a site called Dribbble.com. Mr. Fradin met CherryCard’s programmer, Will Cosgrove from Fort Worth, Tex., through a twist of what he calls “computer-generated fate.”

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in the New York Times, March 20

THE Beatles were stymied. During a 1968 recording session, they couldn’t find a suitable introduction to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” a song written by Paul McCartney. John Lennon didn’t much like the song, and, after several hours, he stormed out of the studio. When he returned, he strode to the piano and banged out several chords, then added petulantly, “Here’s your intro!”

“All eyes shifted to Paul, expecting rejection, perhaps an outburst,” according to a new book, “Come Together: The Business Wisdom of The Beatles.” (Turner Publishing, $24.95). Instead, McCartney defused the tension with this: “That’s quite good, actually.” Lennon’s chords, pounded out in a fit of pique, make up the song’s now-famous opening.

“The underlying disagreement about whether the song had merit in the broader scheme of things did not disappear,” the book concludes, “but resolving the conflict informed the work and made it stronger, rather than destroying it.”

That takeaway — that disagreement can lead to synthesis — is just one of 100 lessons that the book teases out of the history of the Fab Four.

The book’s authors, Richard Courtney and George Cassidy, acknowledge that it is built around a gimmicky idea: treating the Beatles’ successes and failures as a sort of Rosetta Stone not just for aspiring rock stars, but also for businesspeople everywhere. Such a premise is sure to earn some flak from certain Beatles fans who “don’t feel that the Beatles and business are topics that mix comfortably,” Mr. Cassidy says.

“There were some very visible failures, particularly in the late ’60s, centered around the Apple group of companies,” he says, referring to the various enterprises the Beatles started at the time to enter the film, record and retail businesses. “For a lot of people that became the whole story as far as the Beatles and business are concerned. Our approach was to take a look at a longer trend line, a bigger set of facts, and say by and large this thing has been ticking upwards for almost 50 years now.”

It’s an intriguing idea — that by studying creative people who are passionate about what they do, we can enhance our own creativity, and business savvy, even if we work in a completely different arena.

Of course, it’s easier for most people to relate to musicians and their work than, say, to people who design furniture (and their end tables). The obvious emotion underlying a great song makes us feel that we have at least some understanding of the performers and their motivations. The authors of “Come Together,” both Nashville residents and avid Beatles fans, make the most of that idea: that in the beginning at least, the Beatles were just like you and me.

For example, when the Beatles were a young band, their only means of transportation was a van missing its windshield. That meant that in the dead of winter, traveling across England to a gig was such a frigid experience that the band members who weren’t driving huddled on top of one another for warmth, the authors write, adding: “Take a page out of their book. Although frostbite is generally a bad idea, avoid relying heavily on debt to finance your daily operations or growth.”

THE Lennon-McCartney decision to always share credit on songs provided another lesson, the authors suggest: Don’t waste time arguing over crumbs when that energy could be better used building a bakery — or, in this case, the Beatles songbook.

Another story from the Beatles’ early years highlights the importance of heeding feedback, even when it’s not what you want to hear. Executives at Capitol Records, the American affiliate of EMI, took a pass on “Love Me Do.” Even after the success of “Please, Please Me” — a No. 1 album in Britain — Capitol refused to issue the record or any of its singles.

The Beatles could have kept arguing about the album’s merits, or simply given up on conquering America. Instead, Mr. Courtney and Mr. Cassidy explain, they kept recording new material and sending it to Capitol — for one solid year. Finally, in 1964, Capitol released “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which became the Beatles’ first No. 1 hit in the United States.

Research shows that wasps can be taught to sniff out most anything, even bedbugs. Two scientists want to turn the idea into a product but face challenges in raising capital.

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in the New York Times, February 20, 2011

THE white paper by the Georgia scientists Glen C. Rains and W. Joe Lewis has a technical-sounding title that masks the exciting news within. “A Project to Bring Innovative New Technology Into the Market Place for Detecting Agents of Harm in Agriculture, Security, and Human Health/Safety Arenas,” it says blandly.

Luckily, Prototype is here to translate: Move over, bloodhounds, there’s a new odor detector in town.

The Wasp Hound, designed by the two scientists, is a hand-held device containing five parasitic wasps. These flying, stinger-less insects have outperformed dogs in tests that measure scent detection of cadavers, but research shows that they can be taught to sniff out anything: explosives, drugs and even that newly resurgent scourge: bedbugs.

Yes, wasps can be taught to react to the whiff of bedbugs’ pheromones. All that Mr. Rains and Mr. Lewis say they need to get their company, SmartHound Technologies, on the road to addressing the nation’s outbreak of bloodsucking pests — among many other problems — is $200,000. But so far, raising capital for research and development has been a challenge.

“If you suddenly discover a new chemical, there’s all kinds of chemical companies,” Mr. Lewis says. “All you have to do is plug it in to an existing infrastructure.” But when it comes to training bugs to swarm, no infrastructure exists. “So we’ve got this new tool with this big gap that we need to cross,” he adds. “At this point, that’s where we’re at: How can we get across that divide and take it to the marketplace?”

The Wasp Hound provides a window into the difficult process of turning scientific research — especially groundbreaking research — into a marketable product. Mr. Rains, 45, an associate professor at the University of Georgia, and Mr. Lewis, 68, a retired research entomologist who worked for nearly 40 years for the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, have jointly patented the Wasp Hound with their respective institutions. They have teamed with the Georgia Centers of Innovation, a state economic development program, to begin attracting investors. But they know they face an uphill battle.

“The term ‘wasp’ elicits a certain fear, though ours don’t sting people and are friendly,” Mr. Lewis says. Then there’s this problem: “We don’t know how to work with people who are venture capitalists. That’s not our thing; we’re scientists. I guess you’d say we’ve floundered a little bit.”

The genesis of the Wasp Hound goes back to 1988, when Mr. Lewis and a colleague, J. H. Tumlinson, published a paper in the scientific journal Nature that demonstrated how the associative learning process used by insects rivals that of higher organisms. These findings, which spawned more published papers — and which Mr. Lewis says were so radical that “had we suggested them 25 years earlier, we would have been laughed out of our profession” — led to the idea that wasps, like dogs, could potentially be used to detect targets.

First, Mr. Lewis and his colleagues had to answer an important question. While their research showed that wasps were undeniably learning and responding to chemicals and stimuli within their natural context, it was less clear whether they could learn to track things not found in their habitats: incendiary devices, say, or the chemicals typically used in arson. The answer: “We found they could detect almost anything.”

Then it became an engineering problem: how to design a tool that harnessed this insect’s skills in a way that people could easily use? That’s where Mr. Rains came in. “We devised a way of detecting the change in behavior of the wasps that would tell us when they detected an odor,” he says. “Pavlov’s dog, when you rang the bell, would always salivate. Well, wasps don’t salivate, but we found some specific behaviors they did do.”

When wasps have been trained to associate a particular odor with a reward — a good, long drink of sugar water — they get excited when they smell it. “They really move around,” Mr. Lewis says. “Like pigs to a trough.” But unlike pigs, these adult wasps live only about three weeks.

By AMY WALLACE

ONE way to understand Emilio Estevez’s backyard vineyard might be to recall a scene from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Remember Richard Dreyfuss, after a run-in with a U.F.O., obsessively fashioning mountains out of mashed potatoes and shaving cream? Except for the U.F.O., that’s kind of how Mr. Estevez is about growing grapes.

“One day I came home and he had dug up all the grass,” recalled Sonja Magdevski, Mr. Estevez’s fiancée. “He was like: ‘We’re going to plant! We need more space!’ ”

The year was 2005, and Mr. Estevez was working on “Bobby,” a film he wrote and directed, about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The couple lived, as they still do, in a Spanish-style home on a one-acre lot in Malibu — not exactly a prime locale for vintners.

Mr. Estevez had already planted the front yard with vines, ignoring the protests of his parents, Martin and Janet Sheen, who live right down the street. (According to him, they said: “You’re out of your mind. What are you doing?”) Now, excepting the house, the pool and the bocce court, he was determined to fill almost every square inch of the property with 800 vines.

“We were just a couple of rubes,” Mr. Estevez said, acknowledging how little he knew about what he and Ms. Magdevski were embarking upon at the time. “Now, I’m a zealot.”

The Prototype column has focused mostly on innovative people and their ideas — how they develop, protect and profit from them and, often, how their mistakes lead to successes. In this column, I examine a more abstract phenomenon: people who battle creative burnout by using the same muscles they developed to do one thing in order to do something completely different.

Consider the Washington Redskins tight end Chris Cooley, a 6-foot-3, 250-pound, two-time Pro Bowler. Last month, this newspaper reported that he throws pots in his spare time, using ceramics to recharge and to keep him fresh for his day job.

Mr. Estevez is no different. What others would call a hobby, he calls “a meditation” — a complementary pursuit that not only helps him to weather the vagaries of the movie business, but also, he says, to write better scripts.

“I write a lot of dialogue out there,” Mr. Estevez, 48, said the other day while looking out the window at the pinot noir plants that he and Ms. Magdevski had recently pruned. He found his vineyard, named Casa Dumetz, particularly useful for working out the kinks and frustrations in the creation of his latest film, “The Way,” which has yet to be released in the United States.

“I’d do a row and then back inside to write and then back outside,” he said. “It was this wonderful exchange.”

“Our first year making wine was a lot like my first film,” he acknowledged, smiling as he remembered 2007, when the first wine was bottled under the Casa Dumetz name. He said that in both winemaking and filmmaking, “I’ve gotten better, and the reviews have gotten better.”

Best known in his younger years as a member of the Brat Pack — that group of fresh-faced actors who tended to pop up, as he did, in John Hughes movies like “The Breakfast Club” — Mr. Estevez in the 1990s found himself all grown up. During this period, he leveraged his work in mainstream efforts like “The Mighty Ducks” from Disney (and its two sequels) to fuel self-produced fare like a Vietnam-era drama, “The War at Home.”

He also developed a fascination with wine, collecting California cult cabernets and high-end Bordeaux and making regular visits to the vineyards of Napa Valley.

This is probably the right time to mention that yes, Mr. Estevez has seen — and laughed at — a current TV commercial for Charles Schwab in which a man saving for retirement mocks the poor investment advice he’s been given oven the years by saying, “A vineyard? Give me a break!”

Mr. Estevez does not believe that growing grapes ensures financial stability. While Casa Dumetz is expanding this year — tripling its output to 624 cases, made partly with grapes grown off site — Mr. Estevez says his motivation has always been more spiritual than fiscal.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in New York Times, December 25, 2010

LAST week was Doyle Doss’s busiest of the year. An advocacy group for the homeless had called from St. Louis to buy 12 of his Kandle Heeter Candle Holders, which promise “dry, radiant space heat from a candle” for just $29.95 each. He also had a bunch of laminated wildlife portraits — priced at $14.95 and sized to “make your refrigerator happy” — to put in the mail, and so many wearable hummingbird feeders on order that he had to hire part-time help to build them all.

Yes, you read that last one right: Mr. Doss, whose tiny creative enterprise, Doss Products, is based in a chilly cow barn just south of Eureka, Calif., is the proud inventor of a hummingbird feeder that he calls the :–2<: (pronounced “eye 2 eye”). Priced at $79.95, it is a red, helmetlike contraption that dispenses sugar water from a tube positioned between two eyeholes. You wear it on your face.

“Innovation and invention in America are not dead,” wrote Mr. Doss, 62, in an e-mail that included links to YouTube videos that he said proved his point. In them, hummingbirds hovered two inches above people’s nostrils, sticking their beaks into the red, vaguely frightening masks.

Watching them, you couldn’t help but think: If that isn’t American ingenuity at its wacky finest, what is?

Prototype heard from hundreds of inventors in 2010, and most told of a problem they had encountered that they just had to solve. Among the things that stoked their creativity were cleavage, a skiing accident, a tattered pair of blue jeans, the complications of shaving, and the desire to not spill a cup of coffee while boarding an airplane. The solutions included a variety of products and services: a snap-to-bra camisole-like device (cleava.com), arch supports (lovemystrutz.com), a repair service for beloved jeans (denimtherapy.com), a razor whose handle dispenses shaving cream (ShaveMate.com) and a portable cup holder (cup-pilot.com).

More was motivating many of these folks than mere necessity or the hopes of striking it rich. In many of the e-mails, there was an undercurrent of something more fundamental: the inventors’ need to express themselves, to leave their mark and to communicate and connect with others not by talking or writing, but by building stuff.

“It’s an ego thing,” says Pam Starobin, another inventor who got in touch.

Ms. Starobin, 55, is a librarian who lives in Yonkers. She’s something of a renaissance woman, with a nearly completed master’s degree in art history and a previous career writing computer software; she invented CostGuard, a program for restaurant and food service management. But her proudest achievement, professionally speaking, is her invention of an adult booster seat.

Ms. Starobin, you see, stands just 4 feet 11. And when she sits, well, she’s even shorter. For years, a trip to the theater made her teeth grind together as she stared at the backs of people’s heads. At some low-slung restaurants, it was as if her chin barely reached the tabletop. “I’d seethe, instead of enjoying what I’m doing,” she says. “I thought: I can resolve this.”

The Sitting Taller Handbag (sittingtaller.com) is the result. Made of furniture-grade foam hidden inside a leather shoulder bag, it comes in black, red or green and sells for $129 for a 2 ½-inch lift ($139 for 3 ½ inches). Ms. Starobin has its leatherwork sewn for her, but she makes all the pillows herself. Since starting in March 2008, she says, she’s sold several hundred.

Does she make any money? “A very little bit,” she says. “I’m not leaving my job — let me put it that way.” But what she lacks in remuneration she makes up for in satisfaction. She gets letters that say things like: “Just so you know, this present was the biggest hit at Hanukkah. You made a 96-year-old lady who still loves the philharmonic and theater very, very happy!”

“It’s like, I’ve helped someone,” Ms. Starobin says. “It’s pretty cool.”

MR. DOSS, too, is motivated by utility. “How do I help people stay warmer in winter?” was the question that kick-started his inventing career, he says. The son of an Arkansas farmer who taught him “If it broke, you fixed it; if it broke twice, you figured out how to make it better,” Mr. Doss has been building things since he got his first Erector Set in childhood. He’s proud that his candle heaters and another heating device — the BluBox Thermal fan, which pumps the warm air that has risen to the ceiling back down to the floor — are designed to save users money.

By AMY WALLACE

First appeared in the New York Times, November 28, 2010

ON Wednesday, Kim Kardashian is going to die a little. So is her sister, Khloé, not to mention Lady Gaga, David LaChapelle, Justin Timberlake, Usher, Serena Williams and Elijah Wood.

That day is World AIDS Day, and each of these people (as well as a host of others — the list keeps growing) will sacrifice his or her own digital life. By which these celebrities mean they will stop communicating via Twitter and Facebook. They will not be resuscitated, they say, until their fans donate $1 million.

“Dry your eyes, everybody,” Ryan Seacrest, the “American Idol” host and another participant in this cyberstunt, says in a videotaped “Last Tweet and Testament” that will be posted on his Facebook profile — and appended to a final post on Twitter — sometime after midnight on Tuesday night. “I don’t plan to be dead for too long.”

He adds, “Please buy back my life.”

“Come on, y’all,” the actress Jennifer Hudson says in a similar videotaped plea. “Buy my life back. Go on a shopping spree and buy as much of it as you can.”

It’s all part of the latest gambit by the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys to raise money for her charity, Keep a Child Alive, which finances medical care and support services for children and families affected by H.I.V. and AIDS in Africa and India.

It’s rare that the Prototype column pays attention to celebrities, but Ms. Keys is the second one who has caught our attention by harnessing fame to philanthropy in an innovative way. The actor Ed Norton, who was featured in the September column, created a Web site that makes it easy to rally people to your cause.

Ms. Keys is up to something slightly different. She knows that she’s not alone in thinking that America increasingly treats its celebrities like commodities. But she believes she’s the first to tether that reality to technology to do some good.

“It’s really exciting. No foundation has used the technology before like we are,” says Ms. Keys, 29, a multiple Grammy Award winner.

On Sept. 30, Ms. Keys and her charity’s co-founder, Leigh Blake, started Buy Life, which sells $35 gray T-shirts imprinted with a bar code. People who have uploaded a Stickybits or Wimo application to their smartphones can donate $10 to Keep a Child Alive simply by scanning any Buy Life T-shirt’s bar code.

“This Shirt Fights AIDS,” the shirts say on the back. “Scan the bar code or Text ‘BUYLIFE’ to 90999 to Join the Fight.”

The planned “Digital Death” this week will take that idea a step further. Famous people with lots of friends, fans and followers will go silent online, but not before calling for an outbreak of generosity. The participants are believed to have nearly 29 million fans on Twitter alone.

And as of Sunday, three days before World AIDS Day, stylized full-color photographs of celebrities lying in coffins, seemingly lifeless, with eyes closed, are to be displayed on the Buy Life Web site.

“Kim Kardashian is DEAD,” says the text that accompanies one of those photos, which features the reality-show star in a low-cut sequined burial outfit that suggests she “died” after a night out clubbing. “Kim sacrificed her digital life to give real life to millions of others,” it adds, asking fans to “visit Buylife.org or text ‘KIM’ to ‘90999’ to buy her life now.”

The strategy here is not just to shock people into paying attention but to enable them to give by doing, as Ms. Keys puts it, “what you always do.”

“You’re always texting your friends,” she says. “Now, you’re going to text to Buy Life.”

All that fans have to do is text the first name of the celebrity they’re “mourning” to 90999, and $10 will be donated.

“It’s a really instant way of grabbing their compassion,” Ms. Blake says.

You’ve heard of impulse buying. These women hope to create a new phenomenon: impulse giving. But the twist is that they’re still couching it in retail terms — winking at people in a way that makes them want to join in. “We’re taking the fixation with retail and with buying and all of that, and we’re turning it on its head,” Ms. Blake says.