NEW YORK – What comes after Y2K?

If we avoid the Big Meltdown, and the fin de millennium turns out to be less than apocalyptic, one of the first tasks we'll face will be to name the decade after the 90s.

Just doing the math won't help. Tags for the zero-laden next decade floated in popular magazines in recent weeks have included such ungainly – or outright depressing – monikers as the Zeroes, the Singles, the 2000s, the Double-Os, the Oh-Ohs, the Y2Ks, and the Millies.

Futurist Faith Popcorn is billing the next cultural growth-spurt as the "EVEolennium," an era of marketing influenced by the growing economic clout of women that will launch the "e-lennium."

If none of those names ring your chimes, you're not alone.

A cheeky Silicon Alley-based arts collective called Foomedia has come along with a grassroots campaign to encourage the widespread adoption of its own idea as the buzz phrase of the decade.

In the past few days, posters and stickers have appeared on walls and in phone booths all over downtown Manhattan. "The coming decade has a name," they declare. "Naught = 0. Naughty = Fun."

Goodbye, '90s. Hello, "Naughties."

Over the weekend, Foomedia launched the online arm of its campaign to spread the Naughties meme. Visitors to Project Naughtie headquarters at Naughties.com are invited to register as "naughtie boys and girls," and to download posters and stickers emblazoned with the grinning face of the campaign's mysterious figurehead: a toothy, cowlicked, not altogether innocent-looking boy named "Guru Adrian."

Guru Adrian is the jaunty "non-prophet" alter ego of the mastermind behind Project Naughtie, artist David Wales.

"Who wants to live through 'the Zeroes?'" asks Wales. The catchier moniker came to him in a moment of inspiration on the subway, he says. He remembers giggling out loud.

"That's how I know it's a good name – everyone I've told it to has laughed."

The Project Naughtie team hopes that, by christening the decade with a name that suggests creative subversion, they'll help jumpstart the next millennium with 10 years of irreverent innovation.

Predicting trends is more than just a hobby for Wales, whose day job is keeping an eye on the Zeitgeist for Toyota. The car manufacturer employs the Australian-born artist as a "cultural forecaster." Recent research included clocking the contents of messenger bags, backpacks, and purses of New Yorkers attempting to lug their increasingly mobile offices around on straps across their shoulders.

"When people ask me what people are going to be wearing in five years," says Wales, "I tell them, 'Computers.'"

To launch the Naughties campaign, Wales hooked up with Matt Frost and Geoff Seelinger, whose two-person startup, Foomedia, has done print advertising and Web design for scrappy online destinations aimed at teens such as Planet Kiki and a do-it-yourself DJ site called the Dollhouse. Seelinger says he likes the Naughties tag because "it implies innocence and mischief. It's about extending boundaries in a playful way."

Frost sees an inherent optimism in the sharing of ideas and resources on the Web that encouraged the team's ambition to coin a catchphrase for the next decade. The team has no commercial interest in the Naughties tag – they just want to see their snappy, upbeat name catch on.

The campaign is being run out of the Foomedia studio, which is located on the site of a former brothel on Third Avenue. More Web projects and a Naughties dance track for MTV are in the works, and Frost and Seelinger plan to use movie projectors rescued from a local dumpster to screen Naughties graphics on the huge wall outside their studio. A pair of trendy gift shops called Alphabets have volunteered their windows in January in service of the cause, and a window-dresser at upmarket Bergdorf-Goodman is considering highlighting a Naughties exhibit early next year.

The Project Naughtie team is decidedly psyched about the future. Jaded New York-style irony and cynicism are "so 20th century," Wales quips.

Seelinger, who studied post-Structuralism in college, adds that "perhaps we needed a critique of everything at the end of the century. But it's time to move on. It's time to make good with what we know."