“Software is just about the most boring topic in general,” admits Sanjay Poonen, Head of Technology Solutions & Mobile at SAP. “So you have to make it creative.”

The self-described citizen of the world describes his work as “bringing a very different design thinking to this boring idea called enterprise software. And it’s all of a sudden becoming very exciting again.”

Design thinking, he explains, is “a very simple principle: get yourself close to a customer, empathize with what they are really going through. Don’t design software just for the back of the labs.”

Poonen sees his company’s work as a force for social good. “The population of Bangladesh is 160 million, and about half of that population has never seen a bank, doesn’t know what an ATM card looks like, but many of them have phones now,” he says. “And through the phone, we can power a very simple way by which the farmer or the agricultural worker can get a microfinance loan to buy their agricultural purchases for the day. This is global banking for the unbanked. So these are uses of new technology that are really going to touch people’s lives and change their lives for the better.”

Looking forward, Poonen emphasizes the need for constant change and improvement. “If you’re not reinventing yourself, not just every 10 or 20 years, but every year, you will become extinct,” he warns. “I encourage every one of our leaders to be in that spirit of constant learning. You can’t teach if you’re not learning.”

“Technology is a grand equalizer across the entire world,” he continues. “So we really want to encourage every entrepreneur to dream the biggest dream they can. And then our job is to help them be successful, give them the resources we can, and then celebrate their success.”

C2-MTL’s program for 2014 is off to a blockbuster start with the confirmation of legendary filmmaker and envelope-pushing explorer, James Cameron.

While best known for his work writing and directing such groundbreaking box office hits as Titanic, Aliens, The Terminator and Avatar, Cameron’s fascination with the ocean depths has also established him as one of the world’s great explorers. In 2012, Cameron broke the record for the deepest solo dive, piloting the specially built Deepsea Challenger submarine seven miles to Earth’s deepest point, a section of the Mariana Trench called Challenger Deep.

Cameron is also actively involved in advancing outer space research and exploration, working closely with scientists and robotics engineers in the designing and prototyping of equipment and architectures for a human expedition to Mars.

Given the subject matter of films like Aliens and The Abyss, it’s hard not be a little surprised by Cameron’s desire to plunge into the dark unknown of outer space and Earth’s oceans. Yet his fascination with what lies beyond clearly outweighs the fear of what he might find.

Young Diane von Furstenberg didn’t know what she wanted to do, but she knew what she wanted to be. In the large scope of things, she wanted to be driving the bus, she wanted to be in charge of her life. Her mother always told her to be independent, and young Diane took that to heart. Working at a European fashion mill that was producing scarves for major Italian labels, Diane began to have her first inkling of where her future may lie. For someone less determined of her generation, life as a career woman may have been cut short upon discovering that she was pregnant. But not Diane. She married the young prince she was dating at the time, and journeyed over to America where he was studying. But not before producing a few samples at the mill where she had been working, to take with her.

And so started the long trajectory of DvF’s career, from scarves to tops to the famous wrap dress, now an iconic staple of capital “F” Fashion’s repertoire. In fact, that eponymous dress celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and is truly the first dress that has weathered for decades Fashion’s fickle tendencies. Diane created something magical with that dress; a dress that weighed virtually nothing, that you could crush into a ball and pack easily, that would unfurl and still look sexy on you the next day. “Sexy, but always appropriate,” as von Furstenberg would say.

DvF was only 22 when she started her label, and was 28 when it reached its pinnacle of success. She admits to making a lot of mistakes along the way, which explains why she claims to have had three different careers, all centering around that one piece of magical jersey. The DvF brand, after all, was and still is like a child to her, and even when times get tough, and licensing deals do not work out, or people tell you your sense of style is no longer “au courante”, you don’t just abandon your kin. You get to know it again. You re-invigorate it. You carve your essence deeper into its DNA. You surround yourself with the younger generation, and see how they wear your dress, see how it still remains a “go-to” item in their closet, even when they’re feeling beat up and bloated. You remember that your brand stands for empowering women, for making dressing effortless, sexy and easy “on-the-go.” You bear down and work hard.

Oh—and you ditch the prince and marry your soul mate after years and years of knowing him, but that’s another story entirely.

Steve Brown wears well his title as Chief Evangelist for computing giant Intel, spilling over with enthusiasm for the possibilities of the digital future.

His passion for computers emerged at a young age, when his father came home with what Brown calls “the first love of my life,” an early Commodore model. “This thing called a computer was going to change the world, and I wanted to be part of that,” Brown recalls.

Today, he’s a self-described futurist who happily quotes the late, great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Illustrating how computers have transformed through the years from room-sized behemoths to fitting in the palms of our hands, Brown foresees the approach of computers that are “effectively zero cost, zero size, and zero power conception.”

 
What are you looking at, computer?
 

“If you think the internet wave was a huge game changer for the planet, you’re right. What’s the next wave? In my opinion, robots,” he says.

“We are on the edge of the Cambrian era of computing. The Cambrian era of evolution was when animals developed eyes,” Brown explains. “In the next 10 years, we’re going to see computers evolve eyes and ears… we’re talking about a computer that can actually see and understand what it’s seeing.”

If this robotic future sounds frightening, Brown is confident that it will be to our benefit. “Lots of change coming,” he says, “and all, I think, for the better.”

As we move into this new era, Brown urges innovators to think about users’ needs and wants. He illustrates how technology and culture can come together with an inspired metaphor, discussing a point off the coast of New Zealand where the Pacific Ocean meets the Tasman Sea. “At first there’s a clash,” he says, “but then they seem to merge into one whole.”

Barry Diller is a big believer in the purity of decisions and ideas. Listen to your instincts, the famous media mogul counsels, and don’t forget that “any new idea is going to irritate the incumbents.”

Despite having spearheaded four decades’ worth of successful film and TV, Diller declares forcefully that “there’s no way” to identify what will be a hit. “All this stuff that says you can market research your way, based on an idea or a script, to how a movie is going to perform, it’s all hogwash,” he scoffs. “You don’t know and you cannot know. You just have your instincts.”

A self-declared fan of creative destruction—“I tend to embrace it,” he says—Diller believes that “if you’re not doing damage, you’re not doing anything interesting.” The central disruption today is, of course, online, where Diller is currently focusing his efforts in the entertainment field, partnering with content providers to make more entertainment available online. “I want that to be the distribution methodology for everything,” he says.

Speaking of creative destruction, Diller has some unorthodox ideas about the sea change in the music business. “The music industry had its head in the sand,” he says. “They were charging $17, $18 for a cassette that cost 8 cents to make. I think at a certain point people thought ‘I’m not stealing, it’s repatriation! I deserve something.’” He sees the industry’s upended business model as a healthy sign. “It’s made the business more efficient; it’s made it more creative, because they have to survive.”

Despite all his successful projects, ranging from entertainment to travel, online commerce and philanthropy, Diller dismisses the idea of being goal-oriented. “I’ve never had a goal, and if I had a goal, I think that would be terrible,” he says. “I wanna stay engaged in ideas.”

Whole Foods Co-founder and CEO John Mackey is dedicated to creating a culture of conscious capitalism. “Corporations are seen as being motivated by greed,” he says, but “the greatest businesses have a sense of higher purpose.”

Mackey lays out his purpose in seven tenets that he’s dubbed TACTILE: Trust, Accountability, Caring, Transparency, Integrity, Loyalty and Egalitarianism.

It’s a refreshingly different philosophy, which Mackey himself describes as touchy-feely. “Loving and caring is something that rarely gets talked about in the corporate world,” he says. He imagines this will change as women take over more and higher positions in the business world. When it comes to caring, he says, “men are playing checkers, women are playing chess – and this is very good for our corporations.”

Mackey’s philosophy is grounded in a firm belief in the importance of a company’s employees. “You often hear people saying ‘Our people are our greatest asset.’ That’s so dehumanizing,” he says. “People aren’t a resource, they’re a source. Sources of ideas, sources of creativity, sources of the future.”

When it comes to the future of Whole Foods itself, Mackey speaks of a commitment to complete GMO transparency within five years, and an emphasis on animal welfare. “I think historians will look back 100 years from now and say ‘I can’t believe they did this to animals,’” he says.

Despite his Utopian visions, Mackey is no pushover hippie. He shows teeth when it comes to Whole Foods’ competitors. “These guys just copy us, but they’re last year’s model. We’re building the next one.”

Mackey laments that in his native USA, corporations have a dismal 19% popular approval rating. “One of my goals is to get that 19% up to 50%,” he says. It could be an uphill battle in a culture dominated by the “greed is good” ethos, but, as Mackey notes, “Nothing worthwhile is that easy to do.”

Shout it from the rooftops, Mohamed! The age of landless farming is here.

Take a commercial building with a large, flat, heat-absorbing roof. Add in several architects, a few engineers and a whole lot of moxy from a young upstart with dreams to spare. Take out reliance on government subsidies, the city water supply, synthetic pesticides, and pesky naysayers who cry, “it can’t be done!” Mix it all together and let it germinate for several years. After a goodly amount of time, effort and perseverance have done their part, what do you have? Lufa Farms.

Blessed with practical farming know-how and visionary skills to match, Mohamed Hage was able to take Lufa Farms from a frustrating concept to a healthy food-on-the-table business in a matter of years. Thanks to its sustainable, closed-system farming model that uses rainwater harvesting, composting of plant matter, water recirculation, and insulating curtains to increase heat retention, Lufa Farms is now a viable, thriving business that feeds hundreds of produce-hungry locavores a year. By the end of 2013, Hage projects he’ll have his produce in the fridges of over 10,000 Montrealers. By 2014, his large-scale greenhouse rooftop farms will be on track to feed at least two more cities.

Though Hage considers Lufa’s business plan simple, he also points out that it is far from trivial. Good farmland is disappearing fast. It’s either being swallowed up by parking lots and commercial development or slowly being poisoned by the overuse of synthetic herbicides. To make matters worse, old-growth forests are being cut down in an effort to make more arable land. Hage believes the modern challenge for global agriculture is to find other places to grow food, using the least amount of resources possible. We can only hope that Lufa Farms is the first of many successful farming start-ups that rise to the challenge of our ever-changing world.

Neri Oxman, Director of the MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group, weaves a mind-bending mixture of science, literature, art, design and futuristic concepts.

Oxman’s thinking draws on ancient mythology and the natural world for inspiration. She describes her lab’s goal as “how to design products and tools with new technologies that mimic what we find in nature.” These products range from a chaise longue, designed with an algorithm that alternates softer and stiffer materials in patterns inspired by the human skin, to a pregnancy corset that can adjust to a mother’s body as it grows.

Oxman describes a fascinating Media Lab experiment that combined 3-D printing with the engineering genius of the silkworm. Her team super-glued a magnet to the head of a silkworm, and placed it in a cube with magnetic sensors. As the worm wove its silk coccoon, the sensors recorded its patterns, which were then fed to a robotic arm that could simulate the weaving with artificial silk or other material.

The project illustrates Oxman’s vision of “biology as a model for computation and fabrication.” “In the next 10 years,” she says, “materials will be the next software,” describing a move away from consumer electronics towards biology. Oxman further predicts the rise of “swarm manufacturing – the digital or social network, the same logic that Google incorporates in data, we’ll see in fabrication.”

After dropping a few more mind bombs —linking cubism to the theory of relativity, and recalling a 1960s experiment in which LSD-fed spiders produced webs she describes as “funky”—Oxman returns to mythology, concluding with “a blessing and a wish that we may all steal the fire from Zeus for inventing mythologies of the not yet.”

“Elitism is the essence of vulgarity,” proclaimed Philippe Starck, as he watched the clock ticking down his time on stage at C2-MTL. “We can have more when we have less,” said Starck, worried that he wasn’t clicking through his slide presentation quickly enough. Starck was very conscious of the time, which comes as no surprise. Starck is inordinately conscious of pretty much everything around him. This is, after all, how he turned an ordinary toothbrush into a thing of beauty, and a toilet into a throne of note. By knowing when to cut away, and when to finesse. By seeing something of worth where everyone else saw only (f)utility.

 
So much to do, so little time
 

One lifetime does not seem like enough for this man with a plan to democratize design. From chairs to toys to lamps, Starck is constantly thinking of ways to improve on the standard and engage with his user. But—and this is important—to do it with minimal cost to the environment (“We must save everything – materials, energy, EVERYTHING!”) Starck believes in convergence, in the big “we”, that we are all responsible for re-thinking how we see the world and using our creativity to better it. We must build and stick to our own code of ethics, and continue to rigorously hold ourselves up to the highest possible standard. In the very near future, a dividing line will be drawn; the world will be separated into those who use their knowledge and creative spark to sell to target consumers, and those who will use their power to help their fellow man.

A word to the wise? Don’t be on the side of the former.

 
Good design MUST…
 

Good design must right a past wrong (like a single, flat, re-usable water bottle you can slip into your pocket and offer up in lieu of plastic) or rebel against the pervading design norm (gnome side table, anyone?) Good design must remind people of their culpability in the world order (a lamp made out of a golden Kalashnikov), and leave society better off than before. Aestheticism is the antithesis of design. Do not favour beauty over function. Merge the two as best you can, and do it in a way that is reasonable AND responsible.

 
Good design cannot…
 

…save lives, unfortunately. “After 40 years of work, I feel a little impotent,” says Starck, “because my tool is not a weapon. We need weapons.”

 
Good design will…
 

Access the collective memory. Like Starck’s clear Louis Ghost chair. Or, for the more Occidental of us out there, his Ming chair. Starck synthesizes what we mean when we say “chair”, and reduces its purest essence. The power in a clear, ghost chair with minimal lines is that “you choose to see the chair.” Its subtle lines and almost invisible contours speak to a knowledge buried deep inside you, inside all of us.

 
Technology and heritage collide
 

It is true that Starck believes that in 15-odd years, we will all be bionic beings with watches and other technological wonders set inside of us. However, it is also true that Starck believes in conserving and rescuing old design from obsolescence. With a little Starck magic thrown in to gussy things up, of course (Baccarat crystal chandeliers for all!!)

 
Plastic is not fantastic
 

Starck does not want to contribute to the world’s plastic problem any longer. He does not want to make waves in an already turbulent sea, or use more energy than is absolutely necessary. Starck is putting his drafting pencil where his mouth is, and designing chairs, mega-yachts and houses that all reflect his stances. Starck encouraged the C2 audience to do the same; think before you create, and add only goodness to the world around you. After all, beauty is ephemeral, but most petroleum-based plastics are forever.

Whether he’s upending conventional wisdom, taking potshots at management types or comparing his own profession to a dog, Chris Bangle has come to C2-MTL to shake people out of their assumptions.

The irreverent and provocative designer uses a lot of metaphors, and suggests that innovators think about their work in this way. “Figure out what kind of metaphor you’re working under,” he declares, “and know when you have to change it.”

As he explains, many established brands see themselves as a fortress. “Even though fortresses look really pretty on a postcard,” Bangle says, “fortresses have a way of becoming really irrelevant.” He proposes that an innovative brand should “change from a fortress to an army on the move.”

After transforming BMW with this approach, Bangle launched his own design firm. “I call it Chris Bangle Associates because I want everyone involved to feel that we have a stake in this, and also are part of the success of it,” he says.

Currently based in Italy, Bangle illustrates this philosophy with a local metaphor. “There’s an Italian expression, ‘The fox is pretty because he has a pretty tail.’” The tail in this case is the team around the designer. “It’s not just about you, the clever fox. It’s about the tail that makes you pretty. Look around you.”

Continuing with the animal imagery, Bangle says: “Designers are like dogs. Some people say ‘I want my dog to win awards.’ Some people want designers to help them see things they can’t see. And some people want to just hook them up to the sled.

“It’s the wrong reason,” he continues. “You want a dog because you love it. And if you don’t love designers, don’t hire them! Because they make a lot of merde, and you have to clean up after them. But if you love your designer, it can be beautiful.”