• Angelina Russo
• Casa CocoLoco

Image: Casa CocoLoco

07 May 2010Last year I wrote an article for Anthill magazine where I discussed the rise in crowdsourced design. For those of you who are new to this space, crowdsourcing is a way of garnering feedback and support for products, services and experiences by going out to the crowd and asking them to contribute. You can here a little more on ABC Radio National in an interview that I did with Alan Saunders on By Design.

Now, we've seen a number of successful and not so successful crowdsourced advertising campaigns where audiences have offered names, varieties, for new and existing products. While this approach can build audience loyalty, it doesn't speak to the idea of crowdsourcing design.

Crowdsourcing design is becoming a big issue in design practice. Ross Dawson from Trends in the Living Networks recently wrote an article on how Australia is becoming a global hub for crowsourcing platforms.

Over the past 12 months, new and re-launched companies have sharpened their offer to enable us all to access an enormous market of creatives who are willing to become part of the crowdsourcing game. I'd like to discuss a few models here:

Quirky has been established to help designers get ideas for a product out into the marketplace but don't know how to start. So, it's supplyside crowdsourced design....There are three major streams to Quirky: Influence Products, Submit Ideas, Shop Till you Drop.

By providing your goodwill and expertise as a reviewer of potential products, you earn both credibility within the commuinty and a chance at cash. If you have a product idea, you can submit it here to be reviewed. If you are willing to sign up to pre-sale, products which are reviewed are more likely to be manufactured. It's an interesting model because it potentially turns supply-side design into demand-side manufacturing. It would be interesting to see some stats on this!!

Alec Lynch recently relaunced Design Bay as DesignCrowd. Unlike Quirky, DesignCrowd is demand side crowdsourced design. Clients with a mission post the types of jobs that they would like to have designed. Designers then propose different solutions to these problems and the favourite/best priced etc. is chosen by the client to move through to completion. Where your reputation with Quirky rests on building influence as a reviewer, with DesignCrowd, your reputation rests with your ability to read client needs. Both are great examples of how designers can build experience and get their work out there in the marketplace.

And of course, Etsy. For the artist/designer who either needs to make some money from their work or justify making their work by selling it, there couldn't be a more well-established or respected online service than Etsy.

The designers/craftspeople and artists on Etsy range from series types to folks who are experimenting with their specialisation. The result is a mismatch between great design and poor quality products. While Etsy seems to work as a genuine marketplace for many, it also has the pitfalls that Marcia Yudkin mentioned in her recent articles. These include: poor quality entries, popularity misleads, coming up empty (particularly if the photos are better than the quality of the products) and missing the best talent. This last one seems a perenial problem with the search engine. I've spent hours trawling through the less talented to find the types of products I was searching for. For instance, - type in crochet dress and the first entry today is a Vintage Mexican Style handmade embroidered (yes that's right, embroidered) tent top dress tunic blouse......(Marcia's disadvantage #9)

Now this may have something to do with Search engine optimisation and keywords, but, in my research, I've spent many hours working on titles and descriptions that would make the SEO types smile. So, my crochet dress, which currently has around 500 views, might have featured, but instead, the #1 crochet dress search item is infact embroidered cotton!!!

This last point is particularly important to me as I research social media and cultural communication. I've been working with some of the top museums, libraries and galleries for a number of years now and they've struggled (as we all have) to incorporate social media into their suite of communication strategies.

I'm also a designer who, over the past 3 months, has decided to see whether I could teach myself how to put crowdsourced design into practice outside of my day job by setting up a shop on Etsy. This seems a long way away from what I do in my professionally, but ultimately, there is a convergence. I've been discussing supply side communication with cultural organisations for a while - demand side is a bit more of an issue with these organisations, particularly as it questions their authority.

With Etsy, you have, on the face of it, a demand side crowdsourced design site, but as I'm finding out, it's a lot more difficult to attract an audience when you're not sure whether the viewing audience is there to buy or to search.

Additionally, while Etsy is set up with all of the best features of crowdsourced design: - enabling designers to profile their own designs community building value networking showcasing forums recommendations requests for work in the end, how much of the audience is actually there to buy? Does it take 1 or 1000 views to end up in a sale?

I heard the CEOs of Refinery29 speak in Melbourne the other night and one of the questions asked was, what is their business model? They too spend an inordinate amount of time building credibility through social networking and crowdsourcing but it appears (and I'm hoping to talk to them about this more in the future) that their major income streams are more traditional things like advertising and events.

So, somewhere in all of this is a call to this forum for examples of new business models for crowdsourced design which address the following:

- demand-led design
- value networking
- marketing design

Which can turn all of that great crowdsourcing work into bucks on the table for small and medium enterprise design firms such as the thousands here at Etsy.

You can read more about my professional work here: http://nlablog.wordpress.com

and about my own crowdsourced design experiments here: http://www.casacocoloco.com.au