COMMON + Project M
For those of you that aren’t aware, John Bielenberg & Alex Bogusky have teamed up on a new social endeavor that allows for collaborative creation within communities in which actual products or companies will be formed.
Benefiting people, communities, society, the environment and future generations is the new advantage in business. Our new capitalist brand is about transitioning from competitive advantage to collaborative advantage. COMMON is a brand that is community designed, community owned, and community directed. It is a single open source brand — a living network — for rapidly prototyping many progressive businesses that unleash creativity to solve social problems.
As an active member in the Project M community, I began to brainstorm some ideas in which Project M (which consists of mainly designers and other creatives) could still engage and be a part of the collaborative of COMMON, while still remaining its own entity. Project M has grown in such a way that perhaps it may be worth limiting the amount of self-sustaining sessions it takes on each year. (Meaning those that function independently from COMMON). A major benefit of being in an M session is the ability for its participants to collectively (or individually) decide what sort of project they want to employ. In linking up with COMMON, the mentality of M would change slightly in that the topic/idea/product will have already been established. That won’t change the format of M, though, in it’s ability to infuse rapid prototyping and creative energy.
Potential Outcubation Process:
1. COMMON begins a two-week process of intensive prototyping and planning for a particular topic. Participants include those most passionate about the idea. The concept is developed through a facet of disciplines (most notably those with skills outside of design).
2. After one week, the project m session is brought in to hear the current ideas that were generated and assist in solidifying a proper goal. Business plans, etc. Are formed through common, but all capable bodies from M collaborate to rapidly create the product or business. It is in this zone that both teams work together in a sort of blitz mentality.
3. Project m session then takes on the role of the design team. Branding and identity guidelines are set for the product/business. Project m is responsible for creating any collateral for the aforementioned idea.
By combining talent through the common denominator, what would potentially have been two separate two–week sessions has now been combined into a three–week outcubation that combines immense talent.
Life’s a Beach featured on…
GLIMMERSITE
_________________
“ It’s an interesting question: Can open innovation help with this mess? Or maybe a better question to ask is, how could it hurt? BP doesn’t seem to have good answers to the problem, so maybe they should be asking some of our best and brightest designers, engineers, and innovators to take a crack at it.
Apparently lots of people have already been doing that. More than 100,000 ideas have been sent to BP from people outside the company and BP has indicated that it is reviewing some of them. But according to one of the biggest idea contributors,InnoCentive’s Dwayne Spradlin (whose work is featured inGlimmer), BP was not particularly receptive to the 900-plus ideas his group sent. As Spradlin explains here, when his well-regarded group offered up its help and its many ideas, he got back some lame excuses as to why BP was too busy to take time to listen.
BP may have lots more unsolicited ideas and suggestions coming its way soon if the X Prize groupdecides to offer a million-dollar prize for the best Gulf cleanup solution. The group is considering making this their next big public challenge (despite some news reports a week ago, this is not official yet).
Meanwhile, lots of designers are doing what they can to educate the public and apply pressure to BP and the government. Glimmerati member John Bielenberg (who has been featuring the chillingly powerful oil spill logo shown above, designed by Brian W. Jones, on all of his emails of late) reports that one of his Project M design groups has set up this site, which includes lots of good info and the below video that puts a dark twist on a “day at the beach” scenario.”
_________________
Shoutout to Brian Jones:
Project M South 2010
I spent half of June down in Greensboro, Alabama helping out with the Project M session. It started off much the same way as my session—no one knowing what exactly the protocol is for a project m experience.
In my session, we dove right in to mind mapping and brainstorming ideas. We knew we had an event to put on at our halfway mark, so we were immediately thrown into the creation process. With the South M’ers, things started off a bit more relaxed. We spent the first couple days visiting local areas and assimilating ourselves into the southern culture. The m’ers were asked to go and talk to as many people as they could to see if that could spark some kind of inspiration for the direction they might go in. They met quite a few people and everything started off wonderfully. They had some ideas for topics, but they were quite general. Music. Food. Sports.
One thing to note about Project M is that although it is a collaboration between creatives, there is still a mentality that one should create as much as possible themselves, too. If one has an idea then they should prototype that and present it to the others, rather than just discussing it. Often times through discussion ideas are disregarded due to lack of explanation or lack of vision on behalf of those being fed the idea. The South M’ers seemed to lack the initiative to create and take advantage of all the time and resources they had. There was one situation, though, where they did prototype.
There was an idea for a project in which a sport would be created. This sport would have originated from Greensboro and through its promotion, money would have been raised to help the local youth. There were various idea for how the game should be played so a few smaller groups each created their own rendition of the rules and then tested them each out. That was a great thing. I liked that a lot.
The two weeks really went by quickly in the middle of it. On the wednesday before their last day, we decided to go down the gulf to see the damage created by the oil spill. You can hear about things so many times, but to see them in person totally changes all perspective. The coastline was marked with oil that had been washing in from just earlier that day. We found out that a lot more had come in the week before and they had just finished cleaning it all up. (Which means, they siphoned the sand and took away as much oil as possible, and then buried the rest under the sand). Anyway, our plan was to create a video showcasing a family trip to the beach. The idea was that this group of people would be wearing hazmat uniforms with their bathing suits overtop-signifying that something is very wrong about the visuals. The actors (our M’ers) were going about their time at the beach as though nothing was different, however, which presented the audience with an irony that can’t be ignored.
Upon return to Greensboro (Oh yeah, the drive to the coast was 4 hours. We left at 6AM, spent a few hours there, and then drove home the same day) the M’ers started discussing what they wanted to do about what they saw down there. There is real sense of secrecy about the whole thing that a lot of people don’t hear about through media. They wanted to present facts to people to help them recognize the true severity of the situation. They created infographics that would be posted on their website. A few of them went to Gordo to create posters. The video was edited. The website was launched.
We got 99 problems but a beach ain’t one.
