Source: Crowdsourcing: What It Means for Innovation

There’s an age-old story about a contest where villagers had to guess the weight of a cow just by looking. The town butchers were of course the most accurate. But a curious thing happened- after pooling together all of the guesses, their average was even closer to the actual weight. In short, the combined wisdom of the crowd was greater than that of any single individual.

Now then, that brings us to crowdsourcing. To summarize the concept glibly, crowdsourcing is when a company allows many different individuals to contribute their ideas in a contest-style format and the company then chooses a winner (or amalgamates the best aspects of several ideas). This can work for designing logos, programming scripts, deciding a color scheme for a product- pretty much anything in today’s technological age of connectedness.

Competition lights fires under creatives, right? It makes you put in that extra 10% so you can edge out the competition to gain recognition or a quick buck. So crowdsourcing is a good thing, right?

Well, think about it from the perspective of the creative. The company will no doubt be paying less to the contest winner than if they had hired a professional to do the work, so in this respect, it devalues your work. But it’s not just about the money. If companies just crowdsource the design of everything, then in theory wouldn’t that mean that the opinions of all those individuals would create a super-opinion that would be better than any individual designer? Only in theory. In practice, designers and creatives work in their own distinctive styles, which when done well, help a brand create their own trademark style. If a company just takes bits and pieces of all the best entries, then they’ll lose the subtleties and nuances behind each decision- why these two colors work together, how the curves of each part complement each other, the overall theme of the work, etc.

And of course, let’s not forget that Twitter paid $6 for the design of their logo.

We creatives have to eat too.

This isn’t necessarily exclusively related to Advertising, but society in general. The question I pose: What came first? Technology or this need for instant gratification?

I was thinking about this topic on my bus ride back to Boston from NYC while doing business-like things on my new phone, which happens to be very Smart. My phone is the HTC Fuze, which (trying to not seem too much like a shill) has a touchscreen along with a million other features. I’ll touch on these aspects later, but first let’s talk about touchscreens.

My love of touchscreens spawned from when I worked in fast food service and we inputted all orders on a touchscreen terminal. Then I saw all the kids I taught at my summer job with their new Nintendo DS portable gaming consoles, which also had touchscreens. From that point on I wanted a touchscreen laptop because I figured it’d be awesome to do design stuff on (I settled on a tablet). And three years later I have arguably the most advanced phone on the market.

The Nintendo DS and HTC Fuze with their respective styluses
(Yes, I used to play Pokemon)

Where was I going with this? Oh yes, the touchscreen (isn’t it ironic how in a post titled ‘Instant Gratification,’ it took four paragraphs to get to the point?). The phone I had before this had actual buttons for menu navigation! That seems like such a foreign concept to me now, but I had that phone for three years. You know those phones are, you have to use arrow buttons to move up and down, and you’re only limited to where the arrows can go. With all this new touchscreen technology popping up everywhere (iPods, iPhones, GPS units, phones, computers, etc.), it’s becoming so much easier to get exactly what you want. One of these days, we’ll forget what it was like to have to use a computer mouse to move the pointer. In fact, maybe the pointer will become obsolete because you have an actual pointer you can use (which is very ironically, digital).

So back to my original question. Is technology fueling our desire to have instant gratification (since all the things we didn’t think possible a decade ago are now commonplace)? Or is it that we have to develop newer and better, faster, gratifying ways to implement technology because that’s how we live in the modern world?

Chicken or the egg?

This must be a bigger target demographic than I thought.

/facepalm