Visual Cohesion – Snakje

If you have not heard of the word Crowdsourcing, you are missing out on one of the world largest exploits in the design industry. Crowdsourcing comes from the word “crowd” and “outsourcing” , outsourcing projects which make use of pool of intelligent brains.

From Wikipedia,
“Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. In the classic use of the term, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer—and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. In some cases, this labor is well compensated, either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition.”

Businesses profits from having multiple designers submitting free ideas and only rewarding a small amount of them. Thus giving them access to a huge amount of different ideas in a short time frame. It may sounds great! but it is bad news to professional designers and also the small and medium companies. The fact that using free labour for commercial gain is already against business ethic, having designs produced by a group of beginners or college students may cause serious brand damage to your company. The clients of crowdsourcing businesses relies on competition, not research or professional consultation and are missing the values of creative designs. The industries and clients should know that the works from design crowdsourcing are not from professional designers. They will never engage with such activities as it will destroy great ideas and encourage plagiarism.

I have once participated in such activities and acquired recognition from several clients but I soon understand that it is an exploit that will destroy the design industry and my passion for great designs.
I hope future young designers will understand the implication of design crowdsourcing and make wise choices to promote creativity..

Below is a comment from a website that greatly describe the exploitation of brains.

Posted by Alicia Whetton on 20th July 2011
I was recently talking to someone in IT about this whose response was “If that’s what the market wants, you need to adapt”. I responded with “fine, provide me with IT support for a month, and if I like your service, I’ll pay you for it.” Of course, he was outraged.