• Angelina Russo
• Anthill

Image: laralakatz / Flickr

11 September 2009Increasingly, producers call on the crowd to both create and critique design writes Angelina Russo in Anthill.

If you’re under thirty and you wear t-shirts, then you’ve probably heard of Threadless.com.

In 2000, Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart launched a website where people could submit designs for t-shirts and the public would vote on the ones they liked best. The winner would receive free t-shirts with their design and the t-shirt would go into production so that anyone could buy them.

What sounds like a simple process of audience participation turned into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with a network of over 76,000 Facebook fans, thousands of designs and a seemingly endless market for expansion.

This stunningly simple idea has successfully transformed into an innovative business. Threadless.com represents the heart of crowdsourcing design; audiences engage in the creation and critique of new products and services.

So what happens when you’re concerned about products with design faults? Well, you could complain about it or, if you’re like the team managed by Maxim Schram in the Netherlands, you could redesign the product yourself.

In 2007, Schram founded redesignme.com, an organisation to help companies innovate through co-creation. Built on the understanding that end-users have huge creative potential, redesignme.com provides a service that supports organisations that don’t have the tools or expertise to harvest the creativity of their customers.

This is how it works. Companies upload a product that is already on the market and needs an upgrade, or products that have not yet been launched. Users post comments on the design and develop new versions, which they then upload. Each new design is rewarded with a virtual amount of money - RDM - which can be used to buy real products from Redesignme.

Welcome to the fledgling world of crowdsourced design.

Read the full article > Is crowdsourcing killing the traditional design industry?

Image: laralakatz / Flickr