Crowdsourcing has entered the mainstream big-time. It has become daunting to find a brand these days that does NOT have some crowdsourcing program in place.
My Starbucks Idea is just the latest example: Starbucks asks its consumers for advice, and besides certainly receiving a lot of good ideas, the troubled coffee chain makes consumers feel part of the brand remake.
It's the same template as usual: engage your community, harness its creativity, and let it create the content for you.
It works, sure, but it's getting stale. For some reason, marketing trends take two to three years before they are fully embraced, but if they are, then they become annoyingly ubiquitous (remember the "Tipping Point"?).
The reason is simple: Marketing executives are notoriously risk-averse (Seth Godin once reckoned that only if you're willing to put your job on the line will you do something truly innovative in marketing), and a model like crowdsourcing provides the right balance between safety net ("many others are doing it") and cutting edge ("crowdsourcing?" the CEO shrugged).
Crowdsourcing was a disruptive innovation two years ago, but now it's time to innovate crowdsourcing. It is a viable trend that has implications far beyond the marketing profession, but someone needs to take it to the next level.
So in the spirit of crowdsourcing, let me ask you: in the next stage, what could be a more innovative application of crowdsourcing?
(Credit:
Greatdreams)
"At Davos this year, four luminaries in the world of design were asked to predict what the future of design will be. The themes that arose from this discussion seemed to coalesce into two distinct categories that I'd venture to call 'internal' and 'external.' On the one hand, the speakers emphasized the importance of privacy and personal convenience -- a degree of customization we've not seen before, that will first be available, as usual, to the world's wealthiest 10%. Designers will create ingenious objects with hidden multi-functionality, devices that, for one reason or another, cloak what they can really do. We'll also see designers pressed to find ways to better protect trade secrets and the valued expertise of the genius creator -- in other words, designers will be designing objects that actually enhance their own professional lives and buttress their privileged position in society.
This vision of a rather elitist future of design was counterbalanced by a set of notions that implied a very different path for the world's creative future -- one that many designers with an instinct for self-preservation may treat with some dismay. On this end of the prediction spectrum I noticed a concentration on the external -- an emphasis on transparency and simplicity and social responsibility. A belief that design that communicates its utility to the poorest 90% of the world will take precedence, and that mass design collaborations will serve a vaster public than professional designers have ever reached. This future of design would be world-changing and would mark a new direction for the practice of design -- one that might not require designers.
Much has been made of the consequences of democratizing design. Already, the designer's responsibility has shifted from creating objects and experiences to creating the conditions for innovation -- putting into the hands of the masses the tools to make their own designs. However, the threat to the livelihood of designers may well go beyond packs of online amateurs.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that $1,000 worth of computation in the 2020s will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain. The result? By 2020, greatly extended human longevity (and a cure for the common cold, thank God); by 2030, nanobots that can repair our bodies on the fly; by 2040, machine back-ups of human memories. In the same time frame, we'll spend less time in front of computers and more time inside of them, working and playing in virtual worlds.
And what comes along with all this amazing progress? A fear that we won't be able to stay ahead of the game. As countless movies and sci-fi stories have told us, the terrorists could use this technology against us or the powerful computers that we've created could take over. While some critics have claimed that this is basically 'the Rapture for nerds,' Kurzweil -- whose fan club includes Bill Gates, Marvin Minsky, and folks at the National Institute of Health -- expects that by 2045, non-biological intelligence will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. Stanford's Paul Saffo has asked, will this super intelligence treat us like pets or like food?
This presents an obvious quandary to designers, who may be regarded as the agents of our salvation or our destruction when 'the Singularity' (or the nerdocalypse) arrives. As Mary Shelley so brilliantly depicted in Frankenstein, playing God can have tremendous costs. If we're the first species to take over our own evolution, will designers live like Gods or be chronically unemployed?"
With everyone becoming a producer in the YouTube age, self-branding ("The Brand Called You") has evolved from a fancy to a necessity.
Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame have shrunk to 5 seconds of microfame, and in the contained public arena of social networks, amateur paparazzi--thanks to the viral nature of social media--have the power to grant celebrity status. That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Clive Thompson's poignant piece for Wired on the rise of "microcelebrities."
As Facebook walls make personal communications open to the rest of your trusted network, even your most private moments become public relations. What used to be said in e-mail is now "the writing on the wall." This radical transparency lets more and more Internet users nurture their image, manage their privacy, stage their public appearances, and distribute carefully chosen content to their circle of online friends.
PR professionals will have mixed emotions about this trend, as the borders between profession and confession are increasingly blurry. Thompson quotes Theresa Senft, a media studies professor and one of the first to identify the rise of microcelebrities: "People are using the same techniques employed on Madison Avenue to manage their personal lives. Corporations are getting humanized, and humans are getting corporatized." And he writes: "In essence, I'm sending out press releases. Adapting to microcelebrity means learning to manage our own identity and 'message' almost like a self-contained public-relations department."
The growing sophistication for managing one's online reputation is supported by the findings of a recently released study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, stating that Internet users have become more aware of their digital footprint: In 2007, 47 percent searched for information about themselves online, compared to just 22 percent in 2002, and 60 percent of U.S. Internet users surveyed were not concerned about how much information is available about them online.
This stands in stark contrast to the 84 percent, who, in a similar study in 2000, had expressed concern about third parties getting personal information about them from the Internet. Teenagers, the Pew study shows, understand the implications of their digital footprint best, protecting their privacy by using pseudonyms or private accounts, and locking personal details into "walled gardens."
Everyone wants to be a designer. That's the value proposition of JuJups.com, a new online service claiming it will allow consumers to design their own personalized and customized 3D content. 3D printing, as the underlying technology is called, is a form of rapid prototyping that builds up three-dimensional objects by "printing" successive layers of materials (polymer, cells, sugar, etc.) on top of each other.
(Credit:
George Hart)
As a recent Wired story points out, 3D-printing technology has been around for a while, mostly used by professional design firms and design-intensive businesses such as automakers, handset makers, and aerospace companies. Recent advancements have enabled the technology to "print out" fully functional finished products, leading to a remarkable boom in equipment sales: according to market research firm Wohlers Associates, 8,000 machines, or 36 percent of the industry's two-decade worldwide sales total of 22,000, have been sold in the past two years alone.
Multi-material 3D printers, capable of producing 3D parts and assemblies made from different materials in a single build, are hitting the market, and companies like Freedom of Creation (FOC) are paving the way for making rapid manufacturing technologies accessible for consumers.
In addition, a steady drop in the price of printers has spawned many new businesses trying to push 3D printing into the consumer market: 3D Outlook Corporation is selling 3D models of mountains and other topographic 3D maps for prices below $100, catering to hikers, resorts, and real estate firms.
Companies such as Fabjectory and FigurePrints produce 3D models of virtual characters (from virtual worlds or games). SolidWorks, a U.S. unit of Dassault Systemes SA, a French maker of design software, has launched Cosmic Modelz, a site that lets kids use 3D printing technology to create their own customized action-figures. And now JuJups wants to step aggressively into the emerging market with a Web-based 3D-printing service for everyone.
The JuJups site, however, currently only offers customized designs of photo frames, which it then prints out on 3D color printing machines and ships to customers. Although the company says it plans to expand its printing capacity to support the growing demand for customized objects including giftware, memorabilia, toys, etc., it is a little odd that it put out a bold announcement (for immediate release) of an offering that is apparently not quite ready for prime time at this point.
The JuJups example shows that there's still a gap between hype and reality when it comes to 3D printing for consumers. Trendwatching, and other trend-spotting media (Times Online, Post-Gazette, Make) have long propagated "MIY" (make it yourself) culture as a key trend.
Terry Wohlers, president of Wohlers Associates, says 3D printing is the fastest-growing part of the rapid prototyping industry. Wired believes it is witnessing a design revolution. Earlier this year, Glen Emerson Morris, a technology consultant, predicted in the Advertising and Marketing Review that 3D printing (or desktop manufacturing, as he calls it) would hit the consumer market big time: "It will likely have an impact on society, politics, and business as great or greater than the Internet. So, fasten your seatbelts. This is going to be a really wild ride."
Morris argued that "one of the reasons consumer use of home 3D printing, better described as desktop manufacturing, is likely to take off quickly is that there is very little manufacturing being done in America anymore. As a result, there will be very little pressure by manufacturing special interests against it."
And yet, we're still sitting here with our seatbelts fastened--but the wild ride has yet to occur. Aside from the above-mentioned niche sites, the big mainstream push from Generation C (C = content) to Generation 3D has been lost somewhere along the way. When will big retailers start to add 3D printing features to their sites? Where are the powerful brands or smart start-ups embracing the model? When will see the YouTube of 3D printing?
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