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Recently, a TEDx talk was released describing the possibility of crowdsourcing public health. The app featured, AED 4 Us, uses the crowd to locate and tag where AEDs are located across the city of Maastricht. More than a great innovation, this is beginning to point to a bigger movement spurred on by the new tools available to those connected to the Internet. It is the movement of allowing the networks being created to actually influence how we interact with one another physically.

In the early 2000s, as social media was just beginning to blossom, the networks created (for most intents and purposes) didn't necessarily bleed into our daily physical lives. As tools became more efficient and allowed for more interactivity and more relevance towards daily life, it allowed developers to be more creative in how to use this new connectivity.

Waze, for example, crowdsources realtime traffic information including tips and warnings about your current commute. So, as GPS and social media continue to intersect, it's only going to be a matter of time before our virtual selves becomes integrated with our physical selves in a whole new way: Networks that guard and protect us while giving us valuable information to reduce immediate risk. A virtual community so to speak that's immediately there to help you out in a time of need no matter what the circumstance.

In the web 2.0 age, it is the new social networking technologies that effectively creates a community around the ideation of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing allows organizations, communities; public and private to collect and share the best ideas from customers, stakeholders and citizens. Users have the ability to vote, comment, provide ideas and give feedback within organizations. As communities continue to grow online for collaboration purposes, the need for crowdsourcing will evolve to advanced levels as well as give people the ability to outsource products/ideas quickly and resolve and or distribute via the web.

More and more we see professional graphic designers throwing their hands up in the air and denouncing the rise of crowdsourced design work. "It's a scam!" they cry. Of course, this isn't to say that they don't have basis for concern. Having participated in a few crowdsourced design competitions, it was frustrating even as an amateur designer seeing mediocre designs chosen over great designs, and on top of that putting in work designing a logo for what was essentially a gamble.

Even the design industry stands to suffer a bit from how crowdsourced design works at the moment. Instead of centralized effort on one project, these competitions tend to create designers that spend minimal effort on as many designs as possible, hoping that one design will be chosen.

I propose a new way to crowdsource design, instead of having competitions, create design panels of talented designers. Each panel may consist of 10 or so professional designers, and one will be chosen as the lead designer for each project. So while one designer will be leading the design, the other 9 would be review consultants for project who will end up receiving perhaps 2-3% of the final product. Every new project will be delegated to a new lead designer. With this slightly more centralized form of crowdsourcing design, we can actually ensure quality while still lowering costs and overall effort put forth by designers.

I've always thought (well at least for several years) that design contests need to be fixed. The winner take all concept is hard on designers, but the alternative is doubly hard on businesses.

It would be great to see platforms appear that make it a more communal approach. From what I've heard, however, is the design community doesn't like to collaborate. Perhaps I'm wrong?

Veronica Quinones wrote:
Do larger online communities REALLY call for an increased need for crowdsourcing?