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.

An interesting and effortless opportunity to practice personal sustainability, care of EcoIron and Rising Phoenix Design.

Consider a simple calculation:

1. According to the U.S. Dept. of Energy, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts.
2. At 200 million queries per day, Google (white), is displayed about 550,000 hours per day.
3. Black Google would save 750 megawatt-hours a year.

http://www.blackle.com

If Google is your homepage, try using this instead.

Promote energy-efficient web design. Go black.

Youthful disclaimer: Apart from being grandiose, I take creative license with biology, genetics and computer science to serve my own save-the-world agenda.

Late morning sun is warm and bright, here at the June edge of a Santa Cruz summer. A fabulous condition. The 2000+ crowd of moms, dads, grandparents, professors, friends and lovers fills the Porter College quad to overflowing. They churn in happy cacophany. In the middle of it all: the black-robed block of soon-to-be-graduates, sweating in the sun. And up above, the great oak trees sway, their music inaudible above the crowd sound.

I am sitting behind the provost, faculty and fellows on stage, eyes closed in meditation. I listen to the sentimental speeches: a dance professor who urges us to be passionate people; a fellow student who bears to us her honeycomb heart; the provost who commends our achievements and foretells our great works. Meanwhile, the breath goes in and out, and with it goes all fear, anxiety, pride, hesitation. The provost calls my name and I rise, black robes flowing toward the heavy podium and an ocean of faces. With palms laid face-up on the wood I speak:

“This is dedicated to the one I love…..”

An eruption of smiles and laughter as I pause before completing the invocation:

“….You.”

I look into the crowd before me and begin a slow scan of the faces. Trying, to the limit of my ability, to make eye contact with each and every person. As I do, they slowly catch on to the meaning of my words. Now the smiles are ten-fold wider, the laughter ten-fold louder. There are a lot of people in the audience. It takes a long time. I make a complete circle, turning to include the faculty and administrators sitting behind me, until once again I am facing the ocean, now totally silent but vibrating with glee. Up above, I hear the wind blowing through the oak trees like a great, invisible breath. I begin.

I come before you in this moment, not as a bearer of words, but of a Word.

The human genome is a single, glorious Word three billion letters in length. And though spelled from an alphabet of only four characters, this one Word is more profound than all the words uttered by all our poets. For the sound of its articulation is the human being, and, by extension: all the poetry, the cave paintings, and the atom bombs that have sprung from our hands, mouths and minds.

Human creativity is Nature’s creativity, expressing through us.

Now science races to transcribe the text of our genome. When UC Santa Cruz became the first institution to share this text freely on the Internet for all to see, our species took one more step in a great Initiation. For with the deciphering of DNA’s code, the flesh will be made Word. We will step back to contemplate the very bodies in which we are clothed.

Through the vehicle of human cognition, Nature is striving to understand itself. And the arrival of this understanding will serve as The Great Reminder: that we and every species of plant, animal and microbe are branches on a Tree of Life that has been growing on this planet for three and a half billion years. Each branch is a unique expression of Nature’s endless creativity; humanity is but the most recent branchlet, straining up toward the Sun.

Did you know? You share half your genetic code with common yeast. You are 90% genetically identical to the field mouse, and only 1% separates you from the chimpanzee.

I pause as the graduates break out in wild monkey hoots and screeches (a Porter College tradition frowned upon by the administration).

And the difference between you and everyone else in this audience? A mere tenth of a percent.

What makes humankind unique among all the branches in the Tree of Life? It is our Creative Intellect, reflecting in microcosm Nature’s own creative power to fashion novel forms out of our environment. So our own creations, artistic and technological, are themselves yet further branchings in Nature’s Tree.

Thus it’s no wonder that the most advanced developments of our Information Age bear such close resemblance to Nature’s own forms: the World Wide Web, extending our collective memory in a global embrace, bears an ever-increasing resemblance to the brain’s own network organization. Computer scientists design search algorithms based on the foraging patterns of ants. Digital information storage, massively parallel computation, nanotechnology–these are all basic functions of DNA’s double helix. To call these concepts “new” is like the chicken claiming to have invented the egg.

On the Tree of Life, humanity’s Creative Mind is the one and only fruit, nurturing within it the seed — invention! — the vessel by which DNA’s message will be carried to the stars. To plant new gardens before ours is consumed in the fire of our dying Sun.

H.G. Wells wrote, “History is a race between education and disaster.”

Caught up in the dizzying spell that is modern culture, humanity has forgotten its connection to the Tree of Life.

We have forgotten our kinship with every plant and animal.

Forgotten how to live in equilibrium with our environment.

Forgotten the Word, that binds all people as one human family.

Forgotten the true source of our creativity: Nature.

And we have forgotten the stars, though they shine on us every night.

Yet this state of affairs is not tragedy! It is opportunity: for each one of us to apply the creative mind. Whether to design high-technology, adopt ecologically sustainable ways of living, or simply to extend the smile of friendship to strangers you pass in the street. We are all acting out The Great Reminder.

Remember: the stars.

Remember: imagination–the inside of our heads–is the greatest frontier.

Remember: You are the Tree of Life, branches reaching upward for the Sun, ever-seeking new possibilities for being.

And what is, perhaps, closest to being, is beginning.

Despite anonymizing user id’s, the search queries often include information that make it easy to associate them with a person. The query data include social security numbers, credit card numbers, porn queries, evidence of intent to engage in criminal activities, etc.

AOL has since removed the data, but it’s spreading like wildfire over the internet on mirrors and torrents. I was able retrieve a complete copy of it (2 gigabytes, uncompressed) in about an hour.

As a scientist who does research that could would really benefit from data like this, I can tell you: this is big. Big and dirty.

Ethically speaking…should we, as researchers, ignore that this data exists or deal with it pragmatically as an unfortunate accident?

On one hand this is extremely useful and compelling data for a host of social and computer sciences; on the other, it is an unequivocally criminal violation of ethical standards.

Given the Google subpoena, big brother NSA, and the ethical debates about scientific research this story is provoking in mass media, this feels like a watershed moment.

No one can ever create a ‘clean’ version of this data since it could always be traced back to the original, identifiable information.

Here’s a possible scenario:

Most scientists will hesitate to research it, but some rebels will and no doubt find interesting, at-first-unpublishable, results. Sooner or later, something will get published, and then the floodgates will open. Because something can’t be unethical if everyone is doing it.

Right?