COMMON: Change Observer: Design Observer

ProjectCOMMONAlex Bogusky aims to reinvent capitalism for the usual good.ByMaria PopovaAlex Bogusky launches COMMON. From fearlessrevolution.com.Can capitalism and social good co-exist? That's the question ad industry rockstar-turned-do-gooder Alex Bogusky is answering with a wholehearted yes in his new venture. Introduced this month, COMMON is the inspiration of Bogusky and fellow ad industry veteran Rob Schuham in coaction with John Bielenberg.

Described as an open-source medium for social innovation, the design is part OpenIDEO, part Quora, aiming to rule the collective creativity and cognition of what's fashionably referred to as "the crew" in solving the most pressing social problems of our time. It calls itself a "new capitalist brand" built on "transitioning from competitive advantage to collaborative advantage."Core to the conception are two ideas not normally seen in tandem: The notion that the capitalist paradigm has the capability to solve global poverty and the business that the planet's environmental limits are being pushed to unreasonable extremes. But in an age when the economical shock of private corporations rivals that of nations - according to the World Bank, Wal-Mart's 2009 revenue eclipsed the GDP of Norway - not enlisting the power and scope of brands in addressing our most time- and resource-intensive issues would be short-sighted at best. At least that's Bogusky`s idea with COMMON, which aims to make a bridge between "consumers" - that's us, the vulgar people - and corporations in society to, as the project's mission states, "design a capitalism that spreads love and prosperity to all its stakeholders." The first is equal parts conceptual vision and empirical experiment in reinventing capitalism for, for want of better words, the usual good.Bogusky's career has been the issue of much conversation and argument in recent months. Last year, he left his namesake agency, creative hot-shop Crispin Porter Bogusky, king of the ad industry's castle of awards-driven meritocracy and even crowned Agency of the Decade by Advertising Age, only to cease advertising altogether a few months later. In some kind of Don-Draper-gone-good move, he set out to form The FearLess Cottage in his adopted hometown of Boulder, Colorado - a hub for entrepreneurs, activists and artists, fueled partly by his celebrated creative flair and partly, it seems, by the guiltiness of having been incredibly well for incredibly long at propagating conspicuous consumption. It was thither that Green was born.To be sure, the impression of socially conscious consumerism - or what Rachel Botsman has termed "collaborative consumption" - is far from radical, especially in the buzzword-infested business world where catchphrases like "triple bottom line" have been steadily creeping into corporate manifestos for about a decade. The topic, however, seems to be especially near to prominent ad industry expats. This month also marks the declaration of We First - a new book by Simon Mainwaring, a former Nike creative at Wieden Kennedy and worldwide creative director at Ogilvy. Two days in the making, the script explores how social media and emerging technologies bring brands and consumers together to make a more socially and economically prosperous world. The very question, of course, is whether and how well Bogusky will be capable to extract the social signal from the ad-speak noise and actually make a meaningful platform for collaborative consumption. Then again, if anyone can reach the exhilarating air of optimism coalesce into tangible, actionable change, it's Alex Bogusky. And he's got a museum of awards to examine it.