What would the ‘hero you’ do?
August 13, 2008
Helpful in times of doubt or procrastination: What would the hero version me do right now?
Posted by Daniel in : Research1 comment so far
Human-centered crowdsourcing? Not yet.
April 28, 2008
In a recent post, I introduced Kluster, a new web startup that is trying to build a community for democratized design, i.e. crowdsourcing.
As an experiment, I recently sponsored my own design challenge on Kluster (you’ll need a Kluster account to see it). I offered $50 of my own money and challenged the Kluster community to design a killer location-aware application for the iPhone. The challenge ran for about a week and a half, during which time 47 proposals were made and 68,523 watts (Kluster currency) were invested to determine the best among them.
The main purpose of my experiment was to try and re-create the human-centered design process within Kluster, which, according to my previous post, is difficult if not impossible. Not to be a mere critic, I gave my own best shot and making it happen.
Posted by Daniel in : ResearchAdd a comment
Information R/evolution
April 27, 2008
Another stirring video ethnography of the Web from Michael Wesch, anthropologist of mediated cultures and creator of The Machine is Us/ing Us.
This one looks at the material redefinition of information in the digital participatory age.
Posted by Daniel in : Research, Social Software, Technology, VisualizationAdd a comment
The Luminous Bath
March 3, 2008
Ben Cerveny uses metaphors from biological development to conjecture about the future of ubiquitous computing and pervasive information. From the LIFT07 conference.
Posted by Daniel in : ResearchAdd a comment
Kluster: Crowdsourcing Design
February 20, 2008
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.
Posted by Daniel in : Collective Intelligence, Design, Ethics, Research, Social Software, Sustainability1 comment so far
