do designers TRULY understand the target audience better or do they just think that they do? i agree that outsourcing to a designer who has no regard for the end user is bad, but how about outsourcing to the end user themselves?

That’s a pure version of crowdsourcing.

As professional designers, we may all have similar tastes, have been educated in the similar ways or subscribe to the same design blogs. Someone who hasnt been shackled by the incumbent design community may see things differently and produce a more innovative solution. What remains is to be able to define a framework and model that empowers more of these kinds of people to participate in crowdsourced design. And that solves the problem of “getting things done,” “revisions” etc. In a connected world, that shouldn;t be too hard. And if we are able to mobilise such a large movement, 1 / 100 doesn;t seem so bad after all.

it may not be great for us professional designers, but we don;t really come into the equation. if we solve the problem of renewable energy, we;re not going to mine coal just so that we can give jobs to coal miners.

i’m currently doing a phd on this subject, and as someone who believes in the potential of crowdsourcing, it is very pleasing to read such intelligent and thought provoking counter arguments. i will be equally as pleased with my research if i am eventually proved wrong.

Who cares about the target audience!! Clients dont have the design understanding so

they fall for what they PERSONALLY think “Looks Cool”. There goes the target audience

neglected yet again!

If any of you are losing work to “untalented” designers who work for free / cheap, you’re losing clients you wouldn’t have wanted to have anyway. If they can’t tell what makes you better, then they certainly wouldn’t have picked you on account of your talent. And they probably would’ve been heck to work with.

@Design Informer: Thanks for sharing this one. Really interesting view on spec work. After reading that post once I actually read it again, but this time I tried to read between the lines. It says:

I already know what happens if I stick to my guns and don’t do spec work. NOTHING. They’ll find someone else. Trust me.

Well, that’s actually what’s wrong with the design industry/community. If you say no to spec work because you believe you deserve to get paid, they’ll simply go find someone else. They’ll ask hundreds of people to work on something and pay only one designer. I don’t think any amount of exposure is worth it. I think Harlan Elisson (who doesn’t take a piss without getting paid) said it best in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

I should probably mention that I’m no stranger to spec work and crowdsourcing. I’m a musician, been playing for 15 years. We work for free most of the time, it’s fun and we do it because we enjoy playing no matter where and for who. But we do make money from selling CDs, t-shirts and all that. No direct revenues from playing, but indirect revenues from selling merch.

I have a question for Tim though. What does your co-creation process look like? You have in-house designers and engineers, but where does your community come in? And how do you handle things like project management and payments? I’m curious to hear what your community actually does and how these people get compensated for their efforts.

This article is focused on the wrong businesses/examples. We use crowdsourcing at Local Motors to design our vehicles – and it’s wildly successful. We actually call it co-creation, because we aren’t “outsourcing a design job”, instead, our internal designers and engineers are working with our talented community to collectively create something better than any single person’s creativity would deliver. Unfocused and unmanaged, this process will fail, but that’s NOT what successful companies are doing.

Take a look: Check out htttp://www.local-motors.com