design and the networked economy, 2008
Since the advent of the computer as a design tool, and more
acutely since the rise of the Internet as a powerful economic force,
designers have been faced with uncertainty regarding the future of the
profession. Easily accessible software has enabled anyone possessing a
certain level of dedication and talent to act as a designer, while
innovations such as social networking and online collaboration have
facilitated the rise of new and hotly debated economic models for
design. Such shifts are by no means unique to the design profession:
entire industries, such as the music business and software development,
have been completely uprooted or displaced as a result of the social
changes wrought by technology. Design has remained relatively
insulated, but this period of insulation is coming to an end, and the
profession is now faced with no choice but to adapt.
The
prospect of this adaptation has been the source of much fear and
consternation within the design community, and not without reason: the
rise of a new wave of amateur designers, coupled with vastly increased
competition and a harsh economic landscape has left many designers to
conclude that the profession will inevitably be devalued and reduced to
the status of tradecraft that it has worked so hard to escape.
Although
this reactionary view is seductive, through a careful analysis of both
the design process itself and the external social forces in play, the
opposite conclusion can also be drawn: that design is moving into a
more significant, more influential, and more useful position within
society at large.
In general, the design process can be
deconstructed into two phases: decision-making and implementation. The
decision-making phase includes all research, conceptualization, and
planning, while the implementation phase includes prototyping,
production, and actualization. Neither phase is isolated; that is to
say, the two phases operate as a feedback loop that in theory continues
indefinitely until the designed product reaches a state of momentary
perfection.
Traditionally, each phase was seen to completion by
a small group of people, ie the designers themselves and selected
others, for example clients, focus groups, and so forth. The ultimate
success or failure of a project depended on the individual designer's
ability to make decisions based on available information and to execute
a vision consistent with this decision-making. More generally, the
profession's viability depended on its ability to perform the business
of design at an expert level, or, in other words, more successfully
than the public at large.
That ability is now being called into
question with regards to both phases of the design process. While it is
undeniable that designers still possess expert knowledge in their areas
of specialization – for example, visual communications or product
design – current thinking has shown that larger and more diverse groups
of people are generally more adept at making correct decisions than
limited groups of experts*, and technology has simultaneously delivered
the means of production into the hands of many.
To a limited
extent, the design profession has reacted to these changes. User
feedback is now relied on as a decision-making tool more heavily than
ever before, and techniques such as ethnography have now become common
practice. Many prominent designers agree that the user should be at the
center of the design process, and this philosophy underlies much of the
current thinking in design. However, user-centered practice as it is
generally conceived only involves the user in the decision-making
phase, and then only to a predefined extent, meaning that the
fundamentals of the process still rely on a small group for each phase.
User feedback is utilized extensively, but the users themselves have no
direct hand in decision-making or implementation.
Outside of
design, new models have emerged for both decision-making and
implementation that harness the power of the many to generate ideas and
create products. The most well-known of these is the open-source
software model, which leverages diverse incentives (economic,
ideological, and need-based) to drive innovation. This model has
generally depended on a large group of creators interacting with a
smaller group of decision-makers, and has been proven economically and
organizationally viable.
The notion of open-source has at its
foundation certain philosophical implications from which it cannot be
separated – namely, that product is not only created by the many, but
also owned by the many. This idea has proved inimical to many in the
design profession for reasons related to intellectual property and
ownership of ideas. The component of the open-source model related to
implementation – independent of philosophical concerns – is generally
known as crowdsourcing or social production*, and this concept has been
applied to design with varying degrees of success. Notably, several
businesses, such as CrowdSpring and SitePoint, have sprung up around
the idea of crowdsourced graphic design, allowing a client to present a
design brief and then select from an array of solutions created by
freelance designers. These efforts have been frequently derided in the
professional design community, and for good reason: the monetary value
placed on the work is typically low, and the work itself of a
corresponding quality.
This problem stems not so much from the
concept itself, but rather from its particular implementation. Such
systems make no effort to integrate the two phases of the design
process, and in fact separate them further than the traditional methods
had ever done. The intended audience is almost entirely abstracted from
the designer, whose only real concern is with pleasing the client and
thus earning the bounty for completion of the work. Unlike the case of
open-source software, there is no real incentive for quality or
innovation except at a superficial level. After the project is
completed, the designer has no stake in its outcome in terms of money
or use value.
Other examples have begun to emerge which apply
the notion of crowdsourcing to the decision-making phase of the design
process. Kluster.com, a startup launched in 2008, allows companies and
individuals to put forth problems, solutions to which are then proposed
by the users of the site. Users are able to 'bet' site currency on
their proposed solutions, converting this currency into cash if the
solution is adopted (Tedeschi). In essence, Kluster inverts the concept
of a company like CrowdSpring by putting the decision-making phase into
the hands of the many, leaving implementation to the few. Although this
may be more interesting in terms of design, the idea's viability
remains to be tested.
At first glance, neither implementation of
the crowdsourcing concept would seem to offer much to the design
profession. This is because neither utilizes the concept throughout the
entirety of the design process. A position for designers cannot be
forged on only one end of the design process, and neither can it exist
on one side of a few-many dichotomy. To survive, designers must learn
to inhabit the middle, and employ their true strengths – as
synthesizers of information, facilitators of communication, and
planners of processes.
The essence of design is understanding.
In order to succeed, a designer must be able to understand the problem
at hand, the needs of the audience, the social and historical contexts
related to the problem, and the formal and conceptual outcomes of the
proposed solutions. They must interpret, analyze, and synthesize
information from various sources to enable a space for creation, and
they must plan the progression of systems as they respond to changing
needs and environments. All of these requirements uniquely qualify the
designer to act as an intermediary between parties participating in the
processes of decision-making and implementation.
Once both ends
of the design process are democratized, a number of professional and
creative benefits become apparent. Foremost amongst these is the
potential for collaboration to induce unexpected results which would
have been impossible to realize within a closed system. This is not
simply a case of more minds generating more ideas, or even better minds
generating better ideas. More importantly, the participation of a
diverse group of individuals enables the sharing of experiences, which
immediately broadens the field of potential solutions and enables the
development of deeper, more complete solutions. As James Surowiecki
points out in The Wisdom of Crowds, “if you can assemble a diverse
group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight,
you're better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than
leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart
those people are” (31).
Secondly, mass participation in design
generates design literacy within the larger culture. Expanding design
literacy supports the creation of more varied and interesting future
work by enabling wider understanding of diverse formal and semantic
frameworks. This goal is one which the profession has been striving
towards for some time, and it is bitterly ironic that many designers
would choose to circumvent it by retaining an elitist stance towards
design.
Another benefit for designers is to be found in the
nature of shared information and collaboration itself. The design
process, which relies so heavily on feedback and refinement, can only
be made more effective by enabling a greater degree of sharing and
participation. By allowing more people, designers and non-designers
alike, to have a hand in shaping the design process, the final result
will be improved. This goes against the instincts of many designers,
who have an instinctive dread of the words 'design by committee'.
However, once the level of collaboration reaches a critical mass, the
types of personality conflicts seen in a committee begin to be
displaced by productive cultural co-creation. In other words,
“information is never truly 'finished', it can always be analyzed from
a different point of view, most likely making it all the more valuable”
(“Wiki or Not”).
Finally, the act of design as facilitation is
by its nature conducive to work that is more socially beneficial and
productive. For years, designers have bemoaned the fact that design is
often reduced by those outside the profession to mere marketing;
efforts such as the First Things First manifesto have sought to rectify
the situation, but have not brought about any notable change in this
area. By allowing people to directly communicate what they want and
need, and produce what they want and need, a democratized design
process would help liberate the profession from the vicissitudes of the
market and create a more sustainable environment for design.
What
would a system enabling massive collaboration on both ends of the
design process look like? To answer the question, one must first
consider the larger social environment engendering the changes taking
place in design.
The prime mover at the root of these changes
has been, of course, the Internet. This technology has drastically
accelerated the move towards an information economy that began well
over a century ago and is only now reaching realization. We are not
only shifting away from an industrial economy, but also from entrenched
forms of production. As Yochai Benkler writes:
“...the networked
environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production:
radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary; based on
sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely
connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on
either market signals or managerial commands” (60). This shift is
taking place on the deepest levels of society, and affects everything
related to the information economy, in which design plays a key part.
In design it has been precipitated not only by network technology but
also by computer-enhanced production technologies such as digital
printing, CAD, and rapid prototyping.
The development of shared
cultural production does not mean a cessation of traditional market
forces, but rather implies a concurrent progression with large
displacements in some areas, no displacements in others, and radical
mutations in still others. Where design is concerned, this means that
highly specialized areas are not likely to change rapidly: for example,
comprehensive strategic branding and large-scale industrial design are
likely to remain the domain of experts, while areas such as low-run
print and web design and low-technology industrial design are already
shifting towards the commons. The ideal network-enabled design system,
then, does not deal exclusively with any of these areas, but rather
focuses on new opportunities enabled by the strengths outlined above,
predominately the role of designer as synthesizer.
Designers are
uniquely positioned to benefit from the networked economy because their
profession combines elements of science, creativity, and business. They
are able to weigh information dealing with these domains objectively
and transmit it to others by making it easily understandable. They are
able to mine the essentials of diverse opinions and distill them into a
meaningful essence, and they are able to analyze manifold variations in
form and create common cultural ground. These traits allow design to
function as the ideal junction between decision-making and
implementation.
Furthermore, designers are instrumental in
allowing implementation to fold back into the decision-making phase. A
key requirement of crowdsourced production is that the means of
production be intuitive, easily manipulable, and reliable. The design
of interfaces enabling this production is already playing a pivotal
role in the networked economy, and this role will only become more
important as information increases in quantity, density, and diversity.
Just
as the global economy is undergoing upheaval, so is the ecosystem of
design. The end result of this upheaval is that there will be more
opportunities for designers, and more designers operating at various
level of education and skill within a far more diverse climate. Both
the supply of design and the demand for it are increasing. Ultimately,
this can only result in positive change both critically and
economically, as a wider dialogue is opened and more opportunities for
existing work come into being at the high and low ends of the design
spectrum. Potentially there will be less room for design 'superstars'
in this new space, but simultaneously there will be more room for good
design.
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