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Early in my career, I was fortunate to cross paths with a mentor who changed how I saw designand myself. He ran a small studio whose influence reached far beyond its size. He led with a quiet confidence and quick wit, showing how intelligence and humility could coexist in the creative process. I was passionate about the craft, but there was still so much more to learn about the tools, and about business. He taught me how to infuse storytelling into design. How to navigate constraints. How to bring meaning to every project, not just the ones that sparked instant excitement. He reminded me that creativity thrives on play and curiosity, and that if you lose joy in the process, the work suffers. Those experiences taught me that mentorship is about passing down not just skills, but a way of seeing and approaching the work. The guru form of mentorshipthe close, sustained one-to-one relationship between an experienced guide and an eager apprenticehas given way to something more imaginative and community-based. For me, much of that evolution has been visible through creative networks like AIGA that champion connection and professional growth. In addition, platforms like ADP List help creatives solve problems and refine their portfolios through focused, 20-minute feedback exchanges. Inclusive group-based initiatives such as Break the Wall blend workshops, one-on-one meetings, and targeted training to build confidence and open doors for underrepresented creatives. This new wave of mentorship redefines how we learn from each other in a post-pandemic world when proximity is no longer a given. It challenges the belief that deep creative growth depends on shared physical space, replacing it with something more fluid and democratic. How are these new approaches enriching creative mentorship, and what do we risk losing along the way? The Demise of Guru Mentoring During the era of the hands-on mentor, you didnt just learn what someone did. You absorbed how they thought, often through shared experiences. When I joined Fifty Thousand Feet in 2004, the lessons my mentor taught me became the foundation for how I approached creative leadership and helped grow the practice. I learned that mentorship doesnt stop with one relationship; it becomes part of how you leadand help others to lead. When more experienced designers remind their teammates that trust is as essential to great design as aesthetics, mentorship becomes collective. It becomes how we grow together. When the pandemic hit, creative studios went quiet. Overnight, our way of working, defined by proximity and spontaneity, was replaced by screens and schedules. We lost the informal learning that happens in passing: the sketch on someones desk, the overheard critique, the unplanned spark of collaboration. Many leaders tried to re-create that closeness through digital tools. We held virtual check-ins and all-hands meetings. But something was missing. The energy of shared space, the easy conversations, the sense of momentum, was hard to replicate. Collaboration became more intentional, but less organic. In that absence, the creative industry began searching for new models that could sustain connection and growth in a hybrid world. The Rise of New Mentorship Models What followed was a burst of experimentation. Across the industry, new forms of mentoring have gained momentum since the pandemic, combining structure with flexibility and access. Micro mentorship has become a favorite starting point. These short, focused sessions meet creatives where they are, helping them refine portfolios, shape presentations, or overcome creative blocks. The approach trades hierarchy for immediacy. For younger designers, it opens the door to multiple mentors instead of one. For mentors, it offers the chance to share expertise in moments that matter most. At the same time, peer learning communities are reshaping how creatives connect. These networks erase titles and encourage reciprocity. One week you are the mentor, the next you are the learner. Younger professionals bring fresh fluency in tools and culture, while veterans share hard-won perspectives. That exchange keeps creative cultures evolving. Even traditional apprenticeship models are changing shape. Adobes Creative Apprenticeship, for instance, links aspiring designers with more than 200 creative leaders and 35 agency partners. It borrows the rigor of the studio system but scales it globally. Meanwhile, digital communities of practice have become the connective tissue of the industry. Organized around disciplines or shared challenges, they create space for ongoing dialogue, workshops, and portfolio exchange. Together, these models show that mentorship did not vanish in the pandemic. It adapted. It became faster, more open, and more human in its reach. The Benefits of Peer Learning and Community New forms of mentorship break down barriers of geography, hierarchy, and privilege. A designer in Nairobi can now receive feedback from a creative director in New York. A freelancer can find a sense of belonging in a global online forum. They also diversify the voices shaping creative careers. Traditional mentorship often reflected proximitywho sat near whom, who belonged to which agency, who got noticed. Community-based mentorship opens the door to people with different experiences, disciplines, and perspectives. That diversity fuels innovation by exposing creatives to new ways of thinking and working. Peer and micro-mentorship also allow for real-time feedback rather than waiting for annual reviews or rare moments of contact. They make mentorship a living part of the workday. And perhaps most importantly, they distribute the emotional labor of mentorship. Instead of depending on one relationship, creatives can build a constellation of guides, akin to a network that evolves as their career does. What We Risk Losing Yet efficiency has its costs. The quiet accumulation of trust and shared history that forms the long arc of mentorship is harder to replicate online. Tacit knowledge, the kind that comes from watching how someone handles conflict or reads a room, can be difficult to transfer in a virtual environment. There is something to be said for the value of serendipity, too. In-person work creates unplanned learning: the overheard insight, the offhand comment that sparks an idea. Virtual platforms tend to optimize for structure, not discovery. Without care, mentorship risks becoming transactional, something to schedule rather than something to live. Blending the Old and the New But we dont have to lose the good things about one-to-one mentorship. The future of creative mentorship might not be about choosing one model over another. Its about synthesis. The one-to-one relationships that shaped generations of creatives can coexist with todays distributed, community-driven systems. The key is to preserve the human connection at the heart of mentorship while expanding who gets to participate. For creative leaders, that means being intentional about creating the conditions where mentorship thrives. Make it part of your culture, not an HR program. Pair senior and junior talent on projects and encourage them to exchange feedback in both directions. Create small circles or pods where peers can learn from each other. Recognize mentorship in performance reviews, not just deliverables. Use digital platforms for access but keep curiosity, trust, and generosity as your operating principles. Mentorship is how creative culture renews itself. Whether it happens across a desk or across a screen, it remains the most human way we learn to create, lead, and grow.
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E-Commerce
In January 2025, subway riders at the 59th Street-Lexington Avenue station in Manhattan noticed a surprising new addition: spiked metal partitions between each fare gate. Some commuters called the partitions silly and foolish. Others said they were a waste of money. Over the past nine months, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has rolled out the same spiked partitions to 183 stations across the subway network, with more on the way. Like spikes on a handrail prevent people from sitting on it, these metal screens (which the MTA calls sleeves) are designed to prevent people from hoisting themselves over the turnstiles. Theyve also turned what was already an inhospitable system into an actively hostile public space. The MTA argues it has good reason to take these measures. About 40% of the agencys operating budget comes from fares and tolls, meaning every tap and every swipe helps keep trains and buses running. But many riders arent paying at all. In 2024, fare evasion on the subway cost the agency around $350 million, though it topped $1 billion if you include unpaid buses, trains, and tolls. [Photo: courtesy of the author] At 59th Street-Lexington Avenue, the spiked partitions, which were custom-made specifically for the New York subway, seem to have worked. According to an April 2025 MTA press releasefour months after installing the mechanismsfare evasion at the station dropped by roughly 60%. There is no way of knowing, however, if the drop is due to the “sleeves” or the other measures the MTA introduced at that station, including turnstiles with larger “fins,” and new anti back-cocking mechanisms to prevent people from squeezing in through the turnstile without paying. It is also possible that offenders simply moved on to a nearby station that hasn’t been retrofitted with these anti fare-evasion designs. Earlier this year, the MTA began piloting modern, glass-paneled gates at a limited number of stations, combined with gate guards now stationed at more than 200 locations. These efforts helped the MTA collect $5 billion in fare revenue in 2024, up $322 million from the previous year. The apparent success poses two uncomfortable questions: Should we accept a fortified, unwelcoming subway if it really does deter people from jumping the turnstile? And is there really no better way to get people to pay? [Photo: Marc A. Hermann/MTA/Flickr] A worldwide challenge Fare evasion is a global headache with no standardized solution, and different cities have taken different approaches to stopping it. In Paris, officials have relied on a growing army of fare inspectors and hefty fines. Transport for London, which lost more than $170 million in revenue to fare dodgers in the capital city in 2023, is considering adding AI-enabled, extra-tall ticket barriers to trap offenders. Meanwhile, Queensland, Australia, recently slashed train and bus fares from as much as $6.23 to a flat 50 cents, and fare evasion plummeted. New Yorks MTA, for its part, has mostly favored enforcement. In 2022, it convened a Blue-Ribbon Panel on Fare Evasion to recommend solutions. The panels report suggested promoting the citys Fair Fares program (which offers half-priced MetroCards to low-income residents), partnering with public schools to teach students transit etiquette, redesigning fare gates as part of a 2025-2029 Capital Plan, and posting gate guards to deter evasion. A spokesperson for the MTA told Fast Company that the agencys aggressive strategy stems directly from those recommendations, but declined to specify whether any education and outreach campaigns have been implemented so far. For now, the retrofitted gates and guards appear to be working: Subway fare evasion across the entire network dropped by 30% in 2024. [Photo: STraffic/MTA/Flickr] How far do we have to go? The New York City subwayrat-infested and delay-prone as it may beis one of the citys most vital public spaces. It may lack the allure of a park, or the quiet of your local public library branch, but it brings millions of people together across class, race, and borough lines. The subway is known as a place that generates community, where you see people different from you, sometimes even start conversations, says Setha Low, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York. Making it into a fearful environment, making it less inclusive, isnt going to help the MTA get people back on the subway. The spiked walls havent yet reached Lows local station in Brooklyn, but when shown a photo of the spiked sleeves at Barclays Center, she drew comparisons to the kind of barbed wire shes seen across Latin America, where she conducted fieldwork for 15 years. The problem, she says, isnt just that the measures look hostile, its that they reflect a growing citywide aesthetic. Hostile architecturea term describing exclusionary urban design like spikes on flat surfaces or benches with dividers to deter sleepingfirst spread across New York in the 1970s, when the city was facing budget crises and rising homelessness. Over the past decade, it has multiplied and morphed. Inside Moynihan Train Hall on Madison Avenue, and in Low’s own subway station in Brooklyn, benches have disappeared altogethera strategic decision from the city to prevent unhoused people from sleeping in public spaces (see also the MTA’s new leaning benches). I walked 30 blocks down Madison Avenue the other day, and there wasnt one place to sit down, Low says. From the citys perspective, these new subway barriers are efficient. They maintain order, improve safety, and protect revenue. But that logic comes with a cost. I think its legitimate to think about the psychological impact of how we internalize these surveilled, parceled structures all around us, says Jon Ritter, a clinical professor of architecture at New York University. Assuming [the spiked partitions] work as deterrents, it raises the question: How far do we have to go to achieve the public good of fare collection? [Photo: Wells Baum/Unsplash] Going beyond infrastructure Not everyone jumps a turnstile for the same reasons. A 2019 study of the Transantiago system in Santiago, Chile, grouped fare evaders into four types: those who evade as protest, those who do it because the risk is low, those who see no value in paying, and those who simply forget. Milad Haghani, a researcher and principal fellow in urban resilience and mobility at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has developed his own understanding of the factors at play. These include how difficult it is to physically evade a fare, the quality and reliability of the service, the cost of the fare relative to the local minimum income, and the perceived likelihood of getting caught. The MTAs current strategytaller gates, spiked partitions, human guardsaddresses only the first factor: physical difficulty. It makes fare evasion harder, Haghani says, but it doesnt address why people choose to evade in the first place. He adds that when service quality is poor, people often justify evasion as a form of protest. And in New York, where locals regularly complain about unreliable weekend service or aging infrastructure that floods during storms, the MTA is giving them plenty to protest about. (Did we mention the rats?) In July, the MTA celebrated a small victory after its spring survey reported 57% subway rider satisfactionits highest since 2022. What was left unsaid, however, was that more than 40% of riders remain dissatisfied. If the goal is genuinely to reduce fare evasion, says Haghani, physical enforcement has to be paired with improving service and restoring trust. Passengers are far less likely to avoid paying when they believe the fare is fair. Until the MTA finds a way to improve its service and restore trust, the spikes might have to do. But if they also stop New Yorkers from feeling like the subway is a safe and inclusive space for everyone, there might be an even bigger price to pay.
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E-Commerce
As a mother of two little girls, I expected that puberty would be a tempestuous time for our family, full of emotional roller coasters and bodily changes. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. When my oldest daughter turned 9, her pediatrician said she could get her period within the year. I was blindsided: When I was growing up, girls expected to get their periods around the age of 13. I rushed out to buy a pack of menstrual pads to keep in her backpack, in case she gets her first period in school, and ordered The Care and Keeping of You, the iconic puberty guide that has sold 8 million copies since it debuted in 1998. I’m far from the only flummoxed parent. Generation Alpha girlsthe oldest of whom are just entering middle schoolare expected to go through puberty between six months and two years earlier than their parents. But don’t panic. Help has arrived in the form of Less Awkward, a company that provides resources that allow children, parents, and schools to better navigate puberty. Less Awkward is the brainchild of a pediatrician, Cara Natterson, who has written extensively about puberty (including serving as the medical consultant on The Care and Keeping of You), and a puberty educator, Vanessa Kroll Bennett, whose career has been devoted to helping girls build self-esteem. In the past, parents could look back at their own adolescence as a guide for what might happen to their children, but today’s kids are experiencing adolescence differently than any previous generation. And while there’s an abundance of resources for early childhood, it’s far harder to find reliable information about how to navigate this brave new world of puberty. Many parents today are looking for reliable parenting information beyond books, and through other forms of media such as apps, podcasts, Instagram, and TikTok. Dr. Becky Kennedy, a guru for parents of young children, has mastered the art of speaking to Gen Z and millennial parents on social media and through her new AI-powered app that provides parents with answers tailored to their specific problems. Natterson and Bennett are following a similar playbook, picking up where Dr. Becky leaves off, and guiding families through the transitions children will face between the ages of 8 and 18. It’s an approach that seems to be resonating with parents, who are willing to pay to use these services. Natterson and Bennett started Less Awkward in 2021 as a podcast called This Is So Awkward. And as their audience has grown to more than 2.5 million listeners a month, so have their ambitions. They recently turned Less Awkward into a full-fledged resource for parents with puberty-aged children, including a $10 a month hub that gives them access to videos, workshops, and even an AI chatbot that allows parents to ask specific questions and receive answers trained on Less Awkward content. And this year, they’re expanding into schools with a curriculum meant to improve the way kids learn about puberty. Given the relative lack of resources for parents of tweens and teens, Natterson and Bennett want to provide trustworthy, evidence-based advice that is tailored to the very unique circumstances today’s kids are facing. But it turns out, this is also a recipe for a new kind of parenting business. “There is this wide open lane,” Bennett says. “We wanted to fill it quickly because we believe we can change a child’s trajectory if we can surround them with empathy and community during these years, rather than ignoring or judging them.” The Brave New World of Puberty Over the past five years, the media has been flooded with unsettling stories about how puberty is shifting earlier. In 2022, The New York Times reported that girls were developing breasts as young as 6. Last year, NPR described how more girls were getting their periods before the age of 9. Parents everywhere began to panic. Doctors have been observing this trend for several decades now. In 1997, Marcia Herman-Giddens, then a physician’s associate in the pediatric department at Duke University Medical Center, published a longitudinal study of 17,000 girls, which found that they were hitting puberty at the age of 10, a year earlier than girls in the 1960s. Many studies since have found that all over the world, puberty in girls has dropped by about three months per decade since the 1970s. We see a similar pattern, though less extreme, in boys. Researchers don’t fully understand why this is happening. But newer studiesthe ones which newspapers have covered in recent yearssuggest that earlier puberty may be the result of obesity, childhood stress, and the use of hormone-disrupting chemicals in our personal care products. All of this set off alarm bells. As puberty experts, Natterson and Bennett are very familiar with these studies. But as they saw the panic this news provoked among adults, they were concerned about how little attention people were paying to the kids going through this new experience of puberty. “There was so much Monday morning quarterbacking about what’s causing this earlier puberty,” Bennett says. “What we cared about was the 45 million kids going through puberty right now. They need reliable information from adults who aren’t freaking out.” When they looked around, they couldn’t find many resources for parents and kids trying to navigate these years. Natterson, who helped write the updated version of The Care and Keeping of You, arguably the most influential puberty guidebook on the market, believed that families were craving more knowledge and guidanceparticularly since puberty itself is evolving. But while there is an abundance of resources about each stage of early childhood, there are relatively few resources for tweens and teens. “The parent industry drops kids like hot potatoes after kindergarten,” Natterson says. Natterson and Bennett have theories about why this is the case. For one thing, many adults today dealt with the trials of puberty on their own, without much support from their parents or communities, so they assume their job is to distance themselves from their children during these years. There are aso many cultural stereotypes that teenagers are intolerable, prone to violent mood swings, and rude to adults. Even some doctors and psychologists avoid working with adolescents. “It’s an intimidating stage of life,” Bennett says. “It’s unpredictable. And people are scared of dealing with young people’s reactions.” Dr. Rebekah Fenton, who specializes in adolescent medicine (and has no connection to Less Awkward), observes that many pediatricians are not very comfortable speaking with teens, and she wishes there were more resources for them to learn how to speak with older patients. “When we’re dealing with older children who are seeing changes in their own bodies, we really should be having conversations with them directly,” she says. “But there’s a gap in our training when it comes to learning how to speak with teens.” Making It Less Awkward Less Awkward began as a pandemic project. In 2021, in the midst of the lockdown, Natterson and Bennett poured their energies into launching a podcast targeted at parents called This Is So Awkward. They began by covering the basics of puberty today, like when a girl can expect to get her period, how to talk to tweens about sex, and why kids experience emotional swings. The show quickly developed an audience, racking up hundreds of thousands of listeners, and Natterson and Bennett began to tackle more complex and nuanced questions about the sociocultural impacts of earlier puberty. For instance, even though girls’ bodies are developing faster, they are not more emotionally mature; yet other people might sexualize them because they look older than they are. “When strangers on the street are sexualizing 9-year-olds, this has an impact on their mental health and self-esteem,” Bennett says. “But we don’t need to assume that young girls are going to have these negative outcomes. There are plenty of things we can do to intervene.” [Cover Images: Less Awkward] Soon, Natterson and Bennett were flooded with requests to conduct workshops at schools and other organizations. It wasn’t long before they couldn’t keep up with these requests. Their solution was to write a book so they could get their ideas into the hands of more people. In 2023, they published This Is So Awkward: Modern Puberty Explained. It explains the science of puberty as well as covers their approach to parenting, which is all about staying connected to children during this period and creating spaces for conversation. Fenton believes it is critical to offer parents and kids more information about puberty and thinks it is good that Less Awkward is creating resources that are easy to digest. “The main resource families have access to these days is books, and many are very research-heavy rather than practical,” she says. “This information needs to be in a form that parents and children will be able to receive it, like social media posts, podcasts, and videos.” Now, Natterson and Bennett are thinking about how to make their content accessible across even more formats. They’ve spent the last few years building “The Hub,” a website that makes it easy for parents to access all of the Less Awkward content, organized by theme, at a price of $10 per month. If a parent is trying to help their child deal with acne or a friendship problem, they can search for the topic and find everything from short social media videos to long-form podcasts that address the issue. They’ve also built an AI tool on the site that is trained on all of Natterson and Bennett’s work, allowing parents to ask more specific questions and get Less Awkward-approved answers, tailored to their situations. This approach is similar to Dr. Becky Kennedy, who became a guru to millennials during the pandemic when she started posting short-form parenting advice videos on Instagram and TikTok. This blossomed into a book called Good Inside, and more recently evolved into an AI-powered app that answers parents’ questions on the go, using Kennedy’s methodology. Beyond the book Natterson and Bennett are now taking their content a step further and bringing it to schools. There isn’t a standardized sex education curriculum that schools across the country use today, and there is a lot of variation in terms of what content they cover. But broadly, many educators aren’t being equipped to handle the complexities of puberty in 2025from the fact that it is happening sooner to the ways that technology is impacting childhood. [Screenshot: Less Awkward] They’ve launched a school-based health education course called That Health Class that provides teachers with the tools to educate kids from fourth grade to high school. They’ve tailored the content to each age, and go beyond biology to consider the sociocultural aspects of puberty. Fifth graders will learn about physical anatomy and periods, but there are also modules about body image, social media, and consent in relationships. By the time kids get to eighth grade, there is a module about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and how to prevent them. “Sex ed is not reliable if its outdated,” Natterson says. “We’re trying to offer relatable content in whatever form a kid and their trusted adults can best receive it.” The curriculum comes with decks and videos that teachers can use in the classroom, as well as professional development content for the educators. And it also gives access to The Hub, so parents can view parallel lessons, allowing them to understand what their childrenare learning and engage them in conversations. “The kids need to be educated about modern puberty, but so do teachers who are teaching them,” Natterson says. While Fenton applauds Less Awkward for helping to spread knowledge about puberty and make the concept less terrifying, she hopes theyand other puberty educatorscontinue to make a lot of their content free. “I’m always a little worried education is available to parents who have the resources, even though every parent needs it,” she says. “We should be trying to make as much high-quality, reliable information as possible free.” If there’s one message that Bennett wants people to take away from the whole Less Awkward approach, it’s that puberty doesn’t have to be such a difficult time for children, parents, and their teachers. In her experience, it can also be a very rich time of connection between children and their parents, laying the foundation for a deeper lifelong relationship. But to get there, we need to rewrite the cultural narrative about puberty. “We all have baggage and trauma from these years,” Bennett says. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. We can rewrite the script.”
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E-Commerce
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