Ideas On the Fringe
Coming from a design background and with an insight into the pitfalls of designing by committee I believe that to successfully create unique, experimental and thoroughly innovative ideas collaboratively means adopting the right approach. Co-creation relies on adopting this approach by asking the right set of questions to reveal more exciting and surprising results.
Threadless, the infamous Chicago based online crowdsourcing tshirt store, bases its whole business model on enabling artists and illustrators to create their own tshirt designs whilst relying on the online community to vote on what they think is the best design. Each month the winning design then gets manufactured
Yet in an article published in Techcast earlier this year, Jake Nickell, the founder of Threadless discussed how they ensure variety by ‘tweaking the consensus’ and ‘pushing their community’ when it comes to deciding on what tshirt designs are manufactured.
By asking such a large community to vote on the best tshirt design submission of the month, Threadless have found that those ideas that get the most votes are the most average and not the most commercially viable. To ensure they manufacture tshirts that capture the zeitgeist and are on tip of the mainstream they look at the ideas that have had the most or the least amount of votes and have caused controversy in some way.
To me this highlights the need for an approach that asks the right questions to elicit more surprising and unforeseen outcomes. Sometimes the best ideas come from the fringes and perhaps the best approach would be a way to tap into these, and purposely look for what ideas exist outside of mainstream thinking.
Great post, with a great example.
This week Absolute Radio announced a DAB radio station which is programmed entirely by user voting, and it made me groan with disappointment. XFM already tried that about two years ago, and decimated their daytime audience within weeks, because the playlist became bland and middle-of-the-road. There was nobody pulling out the great new releases on weird labels by unknown artists.
You are so right with this post. If collectively we could create genius every time, then we wouldn’t need experts and geniuses (who often dwell on the fringes and not in the mainstream).
Its great to have technology that allows us to listen better, and to communicate more widely, but collective thinking often leaves you in a big grey area, when what you want is a crisp black or a stark white.