John Bielenberg specializes in ‘thinking wrong”. This basically means thinking differently. And thinking in plural. Bielenberg believes that bringing a lot of like and unlike minds together to spout out irrepressible thoughts opens the possibilities for revolutionary ideas. “I find the traditional design studio approach - where you only discuss a project in-house with whoever happens to work there and then claim to have come up with the best possible solution- somewhat arrogant,” he says.

Bielenberg should know. He is co-founder of the innovative design and branding company C2, The Creative Capital Company. He also runs Project M, a summer program that invites young designers to camp out for a month to solve a social problem in a particular place with the help of an innovative design concept that they have created together. For example, in 2007 Project M launched a campaign that helped bring running water to homes in Hale County in Alabama. (See Mike Weikert’s posts for NoD about this summer’s Project M experience).

The success of Project M has prompted Bielenberg and his C2 partners to try to find a way to bring in a similar sense of excitement and creativity into their everyday work. So they got together and thought wrong until they came up with the concept of The Mav Lab (short for ‘maverick’). The Mav Lab will be a little creative spin-off of C2, consisting of Project M alumni (or ‘mavericks’) who will work on projects that tackle the “big gnarly issues of our day like global warming and poverty” says Bielenberg. The mavericks will be teamed with ‘fellows’, meaning experts from a wide variety of fields (i.e. neurology, hedge funds, philosophy or design) that will advise them on projects that are either funded by non-profit organizations or C2’s corporate clients. “We want to take these young, enthusiastic designers and seasoned advisors and mash them together to come up with solutions that no one single entity would have been able to produce,” says Bielenberg.

The first batch of Mavericks are already en route to C2’s San Francisco head quarter. Stay tuned for more wrong thoughts and other updates!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Design, INSPIRATION. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.