Creative Crowds need Boundaries
Published by Carl Lens November 5th, 2008 in The how and what of CrowdSourcing, CrowdSourcing InitiativeI stumbled upon a great webdesign project that took place in the past two years. The insight the project offers is very useful when thinking about crowdsourcing; its even a crowdsourcing project itself!
The project is called Vormator and is all about the above eight shapes. The designers participating in the project have this set of shapes and a set of rules as a starting point. The goal of the project is to show the importance of limitations on creativity. The results of the contest show that even with a large number of limitations, a surprising variation of outstanding graphics is possible.
In this respect Vormator shows large similarities with “learning to love you more” an art project I covered last year. I’ll requote: “The best art and writing is almost like an assignment; it is so vibrant that you feel compelled to make something in response. Suddenly it is clear what you have to do. For a brief moment it seems wonderfully easy to live and love and create breathtaking things”. (beautiful not?!)
Huh, why is this important to crowdsourcing?
In my work at CreativeCrowds one of the most important learnings is about the balance between abstraction and concreteness: the boundaries you give crowds. The amount of creativity you can expect out of a crowd is very much dependent on striking this balance right: finding the sweet spot.
An ‘open call’ for ideas, like with Dellideastorm is simply too open. The creativity of ideas will not be deep enough. If however Dell would define their questions to the public more carefully, adding more boundaries, creativity and quality of ideas would increase. On the other end of the curve (I think it’s a left-skewed curve) you can be too specific, leaving too little space for creativity. However, the risk of too little boundaries is more urgent.
It is so true: “The amount of creativity you can expect out of a crowd is very much dependent on striking this balance right: finding the sweet spot”.
Would Design by Humans or springleap.com be examples of crowdsourcing?
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I agree with the notion that creativity, and creative crowds, need boundaries if the goal is to arrive at quality and, I would add, financially viable ideas. Creativity alone, with little consideration for planning, will often be largely ineffective at producing ideas that achieve strategic initiatives. We see, for example, marketers taking creativity to extremes all too often: commercials that are so inventive one can barely discern what is being offered. It is why having a well-drafted creative brief in advertising is so essential: Doing so results in ideas that are not just creative, but strategic as well. In essence, as you note, at least in the realm of the business world, there must be some boundaries in place to guide the creativeness of the masses toward quality and strategically effective creative ideas.
“The amount of creativity you can expect out of a crowd is very much dependent on striking this balance right: finding the sweet spot”.
For some reason I feel compelled to comment that: “you are absolutely spot on”.
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