Daniel Steinbock

A site just went live today, that aims to do for product design what Wikipedia did for encyclopedia authoring. Kluster is a platform for crowdsourcing, which means harnessing the collective creativity of an online community to co-design something. I’d say it’s the piece of the participatory Web that has the greatest (untapped) potential to transform our material lives.

It goes without saying that I’m excited to see how Kluster fares in this space. Others have come before it — Innocentive, Cambrian House, CrowdSpirit, IdeaBlog — but none of these have impressed me as much. Kluster reads like a potent combination of community technologies for online collaboration — prediction markets, community currency, user-generated content, social filtering — and applies it to an area very close to my heart: design. It’s great to see someone create what looks like a solid platform that targets and incentivizes a co-creative community.

However, I have my doubts.

As a student and practitioner of “West coast-style” human-centered design thinking, (as pioneered in the Stanford design community and practiced by pros at IDEO and countless other firms), I’m going to be watching Kluster to see if the wisdom of the crowds can adequately substitute for deep, insightful human-centered design.

The problem is, the Web is still talk-centered, despite rich multi-media support. And Kluster is no exception, where the engines of creation are more or less Digg-style social filtering of idea proposals and comments. What rises to the top is still what sounds good or looks good, not what is grounded in real, meaningful user need.

Kluster’s participatory design is essentially algorithmic brainstorming. That’s only half the battle, and, in the end, can only lead to half-assed products. Good design starts with ethnographic research methods — needfinding, as designers say — which take time and effort (away from computer screen) talking to real human beings in order to understand their worldviews, their culturally-specific meanings, their unmet needs.

Good design also depends on prototyping — putting physical (or software) mock-ups and models in front of actual users get their feedback, then incorporate that feedback into new design iterations.

In other words, good design doesn’t happen in one fell swoop.

Social filtering model is one-dimensional. Stories, comments, pictures, videos, links, etc. bubble up from ground zero to mass visibility. There’s no room for the chaotic ebb and flow of real design process, where ideas that rise up because they seem good at first — sure-fire winners, even — come crashing down after a reality-check…to rise again, crash, and rise again, re-centered on user need. I believe that real, nuts n’ bolts, collaborative design will not be successfully crowdsourced until these elements are included fundamentally in the prescribed process.

Thomas Maiorana, an accomplished human-centered designer and crowdsourcing maven blogs about how to combine the best of both worlds in his Six Steps to Effective Crowdsourcing. Highly recommended.

Let me be clear: I am a huge believer in the potential for democratized design, and I see Kluster as a wonderful first prototype. But there’s a real danger that lies dormant in this field, especially when combined with the democratization of material manufacturing. When products are designed and manufactured merely on the basis of sounding cool — we’ll end up with even more mountains of landfill than we have already, because no one actually needed the stuff in the first place. Human-centered design — which requires needfinding, prototyping, iteration — is more than a smart design process, it embodies an ethics of sustainable design.