Offline Crowdsourcing - The Openwear Collaboration

http://openwear.org/lookmap

In 2010, the Openwear platform hosted a workshop on collaborative design, which explored crowdsourcing offline, i.e. a group of eight people from different countries was formed and the members were asked to perform design tasks in a collaborative context. The participants were interviewed afterwards as to their experience and opinions concerning this “real life” crowdsourcing event.

What was really interesting about the outcome of this project was that Openwear participants view collaborative design as something beneficial for the fashion industry and possibly even for society as a whole. The Threadless community on the other hand lays a strong emphasis in the on the assumption that crowdsourcing enhances personal skills. They value the feeling of belonging, inclusiveness and diverse influences that come with being part of an international, versatile online community, not only because they feel it has a positive effect on their design work, but also because they appreciate the socialising aspect of it.

In comparison, Openwear collaborators put the benefits of collaboration into a significantly larger context, not considering personal advantages at all. They believe that collaborative design can benefit the fashion industry as a whole by providing a better, more focused innovation process that can pinpoint consumers’ actual needs.

It's All About the Profession!

With everybody talking about consumer empowerment through crowdsourcing I found it a bit bewildering, that on the one platform where that form of consumer interaction would be most likely, it is actually professional designers that create the products.

                   http://www.threadless.com/Made/

Having taken a closer look at the Threadless community and their gallery of submitters, I found it it quite surprising that only 5 out of 29 people are not either professional graphic designers, illustrators or involved in any kind of other artistic profession. Can that even be called consumer empowerment? I don't think so. In fact, it looks like the opposite. It seems like yet another classic producer-consumer relationship with the difference that the Threadless corporation does not have to legally employ or sub-contract their designers who even do the work without having the security of actually getting paid.

Yay, another win-win-win-situation for the company!