Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, to an undefined, large group of people or community through an open call on the internet. It's the closest we may get to typing a creative brief into a computer and getting creative, intelligent and original solutions back, except it's not the computer doing the work, it's the wisdom of the crowd.
It's a process which has proved useful to local (and recently national) government in the UK in the sourcing of policy-changing ideas. It has also been used to get feedback by brands on new products but this week an article on BBC Radio 4 gave a worrying prediction of how crowdsourcing could become a word feared and loathed by the design community of the UK.
Speaking on "You and Yours", Jeff Howe author, 'Wired' contributor and the man creditted with coining the term, gave a worrying example of how, in the USA, crowdsourcing is becoming commonplace in marketing, advertising, and specifically logo design.
"It's a very effective way for a small business to say, 'I need a logo, I'll pay $200 for it', a community of graphic designers will put together rough artwork...and the company gets to choose from 200 or 300 logos all for $200. It's an amazing model and it's emerging as a real threat to traditional marketing and design agencies".
Crowdsourcing agencies like the ones Howe mentions have been operating in the UK for years, but they may about to hit the mainstream, as businesses look to cut costs through new ways of working. In these austere times, the UK's large creative agencies are already struggling to compete with smaller, more flexible, faster and less expensive competitors, as clients bypass the middle-men and reach out to the creative minds at the sharp end of campaigns, but will clients ever go beyond that and use this multiple-minds approach?
But crowdscourcing is almost the opposite of outsourcing by reputation. It's not about getting a creative solution tailored to the clients needs, with an understanding of their offering, their brand and their target audience, it's simply about getting as many ideas as possible for little or even no budget. Quantity is prioritised over quality, with the theory being that with potentially infinite solutions available, a 'right' solution will be returned, but in the subjective world of design, there are never any right answers.
Crowdsourcing turns creative briefs into competitions, the sort of contests that most creatives can't afford to spend time participating in once they are working professionally. In a time when the creative industry is brimming with new talent (where anyone can set themselves up as a professional designer) experienced creatives may find themselves competing with undergraduates, amateurs and unqualified 'design cowboys', all of whom have almost as much chance of getting their work selected by an misguided client. Globalization makes the prospect of crowdsourcing an even bleaker concept for UK designers, as competition from developing countries or those with much lower living costs force down the value of the designers skill.
But as Howe explains, this is a sign of the times, and the latest of examples of how the web continues to revolutionise industry. "When we say that the internet is the biggest revolution since Guttenburg, that means something. It means that the status quo doesn't stay the same. It means people lose their jobs. It means completely new and unthought of phenomena emerge, because revolutions are bloody things...the only constant will be change."