25.02.09
Three’s a crowd

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Decision-making by crowds? It’s everywhere.

It happens in its most simplistic fashion when many millions place their votes during Pop (or American) Idol, often merrily subverting the whole process by voting for the last person the record company execs really want to win. When we visit our favourite sites, we’re unconsciously crowd-voting, and Google’s famous page-linking software does the rest (by counting those clicks and ranking them accordingly).

For at least a decade, software companies and gaming developers have been out-sourcing tricky programming problems. They don’t use a hand-picked team of experts: they let hundreds, sometimes thousands of geeks compete with one another, to crack just a few lines of code or modify their favourite game (and maybe make some pocket money in the process).

The design and communication industry has been reacting in different ways to this idea, now known as ‘crowdsourcing’ (courtesy of the Wired journalist Jeff Howe who wrote an interesting book on the phenomenon last year). Some of his examples of success are beguiling – clothing manufacturer Threadless has for most of the noughties been publishing and printing designs submitted by its community. But only the most voted for designs are produced, and every edition sells out. Its ‘crowd’ designs, and chooses its own clothing – the perfectly designed, self-editing, self-selecting marketplace. The now ubiquitous iStock started as a site for amateur photographers to publish and share images, and for some time was charging as little as a dollar an image (before Getty images swept in and started pushing the prices up).

But other examples of crowd-sourcing are more troublesome. The blogosphere lit up in indignation at this recent piece in Forbes magazine, highlighting the Crowdspring design site.

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In case you haven’t been, or heard, ‘clients’ post a design brief and offer $500 or so for the ‘best’ design (which they have to select if they receive more than 25 entries). Trouble is, the would-be recipients merrily post their critiques and prescriptions as the projects pan out, and often seem to be the clients from hell, with the budgets from nowhere. Howe himself ran a crowd-sourcing competition for the design of his own bookjacket last year (but whether he got the best solution, or whether the vote was fair, is highly debatable).

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And whereas Threadless eventually offered their most successful t-shirt design a job at the firm, I’m not sure if that will happen soon to the recent ‘winners’ on Crowdspring (see below). You can draw your own conclusions.

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The advertising industry loves crowd-sourcing too, but has its own name – User Generated Content. After a brief period when some genuinely great ideas were produced (like Nike’s ‘chain’) we’re now in a rather tedious stage where every client is after it’s own magic bit of UGC angel dust and asks for people to make ads for them (‘we’ll choose the best!’ ‘you can be famous!’). Or they’re asked to provide images, or video, or bloggage, all desperate to catch the social media bandwagon as it thunders through brand-town.

Even the government is getting in on this, the most prevalent being the ‘mass free pitch’ which is now applied to everything from Olympic bid logos to coins. The drawback of this is the filtering process that’s applied to the entries. Whilst in my heart I can see that letting everyone design a coin or stamp or a logo is pretty democratic, the committees doing the actual choosing often leave a lot to be desired: the ‘filter’ is often the fatal flaw, not the ideas themselves.

I arrived at the ‘Olympic bid logo’ judging day 5 years ago to learn that the 1,000 designs that had been submitted (true) had been whittled down by someone, somewhere, with no reference to any trained designers, to seven routes. Yes, 1,000 to seven. Just like that. (I’d advised they try and get it down to 50 but the other 43 were nowhere to be seen). Nowhere in that room were any of my favourites (like Daniel Eatock’s) – they hadn’t even made the cut.

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Little wonder that a motley jury made up of a celebrity, a designer, a taxi driver, an athlete (and a bunch of suits) couldn’t agree and we ended up with a compromise ribbon-bid logo much like every other ribbon-bid logo.

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The Royal Mint manages to filter their pitches a little better and Matthew Dent’s lovely coin set was the result (although the runner-up was the esteemed stamp designer David Gentleman. I wonder if we’ll ever see his designs?).

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Encouraged by this, we’re now encouraged to enter designs for 27 coins for the Olympics (presumably a number correlating roughly to the amount of Olympic events). I still can’t help wondering if the modus operandi adopted by the Royal Mail for its stamps is a better one: select a handful of good designers and pay them a little ‘seed’ money for some initial ideas, with budget in the bank to develop the favourites… But what do I know.

Maybe the ‘Dent’ scenario will hold and somewhere a British teenager is engraving the perfect discus drawing for our future 50p pieces. Maybe.

Meanwhile, crowd-sourcing, in various guises, seems to be here to stay. Even in our studio we’ve relaxed the ‘this is my project, this is your project’ rules so that our first design stages are effectively a free-for-all burst of design activity. After a week, our metal walls are covered in dozens of ideas from all angles, sometimes building on others, sometimes stand-alone. The best ones get developed and shown, even if the idea is the intern’s it has as much chance as anyone else’s. The only challenge is putting egos aside, objectively filtering, and picking the best routes.

It cuts against the ‘we’re professionals, we know what’s best, we’ll show you one route’ school of thought, but whose to say that was ever the best way of working in the first place. Perhaps the ‘trust the guru to crack it’ approach is itself finally cracking?

You wonder if the design competitions could dabble in a little crowd-sourcing themselves. The Oscar results are based on an academy crowd-vote of 3,000 plus members – perhaps D&AD should put each jury’s ‘best ten’ to a public vote? We toyed with a ‘people’s pencil’ a few years ago at D&AD, but do it properly, on-line (and make sure people couldn’t cheat) and you might have something genuinely useful, and valued.

The long-defunct BBC design awards were based on precisely that – a shortlist of half a dozen entries, explained by a few short films, then over to the public to vote. ‘Crowd-voted’ by hundreds of thousands, enjoyed, appreciated and pretty damn democratic as well. Perhaps they were just ahead of their time?

Jeff Howe’s book: ‘Crowdsourcing, How the power of the crowd is driving the future of business’ is available from Random House

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