Revisiting Crowdsourcing: 99 Problems for Designers

For a long time when we thought of offshoring jobs, customer service call centers like the one in Slum Dog Millionaire came to mind.  These jobs were easily commoditized because they relied on relatively unskilled labor following a script.  Today as globalization has moved up the food chain, offshoring affects everything from accounting and IT to medical and legal services.

But what about skilled creative work?  For several years offshoring of design work has taken the form of crowdsourcing sites like 99designs and DesignCrowd that pair designers and clients all over the world by running competitions where dozens of designs can be solicited for for only a few hundred dollars.  Clients get to sample everything and award the job to the “winner” who gets paid a nominal fee and everybody else goes home empty handed.  

Understandably critics from established design circles have pushed back hard.  Back when these sites launched, around 2010, the design industry, already plagued with the practice of spec work, took their protest online with the NO!SPEC campaign, which fights for fair compensation for design work.

Yet is crowdsourcing, or even globalization the problem?  The true scourge as NO!SPEC rightfully pointed out is the practice of speculative work where a designer is dedicating time and resources with no guarantee of payment. Would you expect that of a doctor or even an accountant?  Do my taxes, and the person who gets me the best refund gets paid for the job.   The internet, and global competition only magnify problems already entrenched in the design industry for years.

One such site, promises “heaps of designs” and encourages clients to solicit feedback from “friends and colleagues.”

And while crowdsourcing design companies like 99designs and DesignCrowd cite large corporate clients like ConAgra and Adidas as having commissioned work, these sites primarily are trading in the low to middle market where thousands of small businesses are seeking logos, t-shirts or web design.  One such site, promises “heaps of designs” and encourages clients to solicit feedback from “friends and colleagues.”  This tone deaf language would make any creative professional cringe, but it underscores that ultimately they view design as a commodity, a perception highly offensive to design professionals.  It also trivializes the process of writing a brief, giving proper feedback and focusing on quality versus quantity.  

Established designers on the higher end of the business need not lose too much sleep over this, nor will clients who take branding seriously and understand the role good design can play in driving business results, entertain the thought that they can solve complex and nuanced problems in a matter of days with this approach.  It’s akin to finding matrimonial bliss through mail order brides.  Yet it does hurt the general perception of the value of creative work and creates an unhealthy side show in an already competitive and difficult to break in field.

The internet or even crowdsourcing itself are not the enemy.

It’s hard to see these kinds of practices and trends going away anytime soon, but the internet or crowdsourcing trends are not the enemy here.  When the change is guided by design professionals themselves, the results can be promising.  Formed by Justin Gignac and Adam Tompkins two creative alums from the agency world, the social network platform Working Not Working carefully respects the creative professionals in its community by both curating a credible network of freelancers - membership is selective  - and by making clients pay for access to the community.  That’s it.  Once you’re in you pay market day rates established by the freelancer to commission work.

Working Not Working’s client base tends to be industry savvy agencies and brands.  Any client scratching their head about why they should pay to simply have access to a community when they could open up a firehose of logos for roughly the same dollars will probably not play. There’s an elegance to this that weeds out anybody looking for “heaps of designs” for a few hundred dollars, a fact not lost on the high caliber creative professionals who don’t want to waste their time with irksome clients.  

Could this model refine itself and become a threat to agencies they serve down the road, where self forming teams emerge from the community to pair, say a creative director, designer and writer to collaborate on a project?  Does any of this step on third rails?  I personally don’t think so but it’s a healthy debate.  Nor do I think global competition hurts the design industry. There’s something fresh about working with a developer in Germany or a designer in Singapore and the multi-cultural impact that this has on design in general, provided the rules of engagement are fair and the compensation reflects the value of the work.  

The real problem here is that you see rampant in all the creative professions including music and literature is the perception that the work is a frivolous expression of an individual who somehow wants to share it with the world, and that exposure is fair enough compensation.  Creative work is like any other work.  It is earned.  Just because the artists who chose to go down this path actually like what they do, it’s no excuse for exploitative models to perpetuate the idea of speculative work.

Related Posts (both pro and con).

Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing

Need a new design: Crowdsource it

Cause, Culture and Crowdsourcing: When art and the internet join forces for good

The setting, the Indian Treaty Room at the White House.  Surrounded by a crowd of cultural influencers from the arts, sympathetic politicos and glad to be invited VIP’s, artists Nyugen Smith and Cheryl Pope are typing rhythmically.  Each are flanked by a teenager whispering into their ear.  As the night progresses a pile of paper grows with cryptic words: “WHEN YOU GONNA GET OUT?”  “TEARS IN MY EYES.” “SAME QUESTION.  SAME TIME.”

What we are witnessing is an art performance in recognition of Youth Justice Awareness month.  The teens are DC students.  The artists, poetically interpreting the kids' stories of the Juvenile Justice system.  The guests at this intimate gathering, brought in to celebrate a social justice campaign by ACT/ART, a non profit dedicated to social impact through art.  One imagines that these kinds of exclusive happenings and events could be happening any night at the White House where, the Prime Minister of Zambia could be rubbing shoulders with, say, a room full of tech entrepreneurs, but the reach and significance of this event goes far beyond the walls of the White House.

Joseph Goebbels famously remarked “the word propaganda always has a bitter aftertaste."  Of course the name Goebbels leaves a sour taste behind as well, but Hitler’s CMO did have a point, although unintended.  Some of the most famous propagandist art is associated with nefarious totalitarian regimes, and at most art with a political message is more likely to be judged as great graphic design, not pure art.  Art is at its best as a form of self expression, to be used cautiously in the service of a political agenda, but when the personal ideology of the artist is authentically aligned with a cause, something altogether more interesting can happen.

Great propagandists understand that an image, like a catchy tune can create a lasting impression that can trigger a powerful emotion.

Why is art so potent in the first place?  Great propagandists understand that an image or a performance, like a catchy tune, can create a lasting impression that can trigger a powerful emotion.  Art has the ability to reduce complex ideas and dogma to an memorable meme.  Combine that with today’s almost universal access to creative tools, from instagram filters to Vine and add a public hungry for building their personal brand through creative expression and you have a powerful feedback loop.

The reception at the White House brought those strange bedfellows together in part to celebrate IAMTHEMANY, a poster campaign for social justice launched by ACT/ART in cooperation with the administration.  ACT/ART’s mission is to use the power of art to inspire positive change, but it doesn’t stop there.  Its founders, a blend of art world influencers, cultural noisemakers and media veterans, also understand that digital culture provides a platform to make this formula achieve formidable scale and reach far more than the guests in that room.

ACT/ART was born from a series of conversations between members of the emerging art community who believed in the potential of art to reach people in a more impactful way than ribbon cutting ceremonies and policy speeches.  Eventually ACT/ART self-organized as a non-profit whose immediate mission was to create campaigns that leverage this alchemy between creativity and cause.  

ACT/ART launched its first campaign around the topic of criminal justice reform.   Knowing it was an administration priority, we understood that focusing on it would provide us with a powerful ally, but more importantly the group felt passionately about the timely issue of institutionalized racism which lay at the root of the call for reform, and we recognized that it was already an ingredient in the work of so many artists. 

At the core, a poster campaign, IAMTHEMANY uses the influence of these artists to start the conversation by submitting their own poster design on a digital platform and through social media.  Understanding that a broader public could be spurred to creative action as well, ACT/ART developed an online poster making tool that allowed people to create their own art, riffing on the theme of I AM ________, a reference to the 1968 civil rights rallying cry I AM A MAN.

I AM Inspirational…  I AM the Youth… I AM Change… I AM a Concerned Mother.  The user generated submissions came pouring in, often accompanied by emotional stories.  People directly affected by the issue of racism were joined by those sympathetic to change.  Ultimately influencers and celebrities stepped in, accelerating participation on social media.

Activist art often appears in the form of the art collective, complete with the revolutionary zeal of a political movement, but until recently, the power of the collective, often a subversive response to a bigger more dominant state machine, was frequently limited to underground zines and wheat pasting in the dark of night.  Today digital culture changes all that.  Finally artists have a place to organize en masse to spread their ideas and influence.  The broader public has the means and the creative confidence to amplify by participating themselves.  Regimes who restrict the internet perhaps understand this power best.

The new corporate responsibility will not be televised; it will be brought to life through the internet and the participation of the crowd.

As a brand marketer, I cannot help from making the observation that this is a potent formula for brands.   The combination of cause, culture and crowd sourcing when aligned authentically with a brand story, can be a powerful marketing tool, but whether it’s politics and art or brand, cause and culture, the trick is to legitimately join forces with artists whose hearts are already aligned with the cause.  

Many brands and companies already get it, and there are many examples where well executed social impact campaigns drive awareness to a worthy cause.   Corporations, politicians and artists do not always form an intuitively natural coalition, but as art continues to be recognized as an instrument of influence, the alliances are inevitable. 

Standing in the White House, in a room of artists, social justice advocates and political sympathizers, I could only hope that the next administration will be as bold to celebrate art so authentically.  And as brands and art continue their mating dance, perhaps there’s a way to direct patronage towards something more worthwhile than just fetishized logos.  

Phil Delbourgo is a co-founder of ACT/ART.

On Wildlings throwing Fireballs and VR

There’s an indisputable symbiosis between the creative and tech communities, and nowhere was this mating dance more apparent than the Closer Look at the VR World gathering at Milk Studios. An eclectic group of people from the arts, sciences, media, and social justice co-mingled with some of the leading pioneers in virtual reality, including Saschka Unseld from Oculus Story Studio and Mike Woods from Framestore.  The conference was purposely held in NYC because as one speaker said, “VR is less interesting when only tech people interact with it.”  

So what happens when you unleash the artists, the dancers, the dreamers and put them in a room with the people who made the Game of Thrones VR walk on the Wall?  Well a lot of talk about storytelling and what form it could take in the embryonic medium.  Will the experience be more passive like the filmed VR experiences that wash over you or more interactive as in the game engine VR experiences that allow you to be an active participant?  How can you craft a story if you don’t know what the protagonist (you) will do?  A lot of head scratching ensued.

Or will VR be best suited to creating empathy amongst humans by allowing you to put yourself in another’s shoes?  Picture a Ferguson-like reenactment where you get to be the cop, and then reverse roles and be the victim.  Would that work as a training tool for police? This kind of work is already being pioneered by our friend Nonny de la Pena and her numerous Immersive Journalism projects.

As immersive as VR is, and the technology will only get better, what’s missing in these simulations is that they focus solely on the sense of being in a transformative place to trigger emotion.  You’re in space, you’re in a forest, you’re in a fantasy world.  What’s missing in these experiences are other emotional triggers that naturally push our buttons, evoke memories and make our heart’s race, like music, nostalgia and stories of love.  When all these triggers are activated along with arcs that tug at you, that’s when true immersion will happen.  

What everyone agreed with was this: putting someone somewhere they’re not and having their brain tell them that they are, well, that’s pretty incredible. 

Donning a helmet surrounded by motion sensors, I walked towards the precipice of the Game of Thrones wall, and later while wildlings threw fireballs at me, I died, just a little.

-Phil