Something is brewing in the world of digital labour. In October 2012, online worker Christopher Otey filed a class action lawsuit against the US based company CrowdFlower, one of the largest platforms for the completion of so called ‘micro-tasks’. The company claims to have a reserve army of millions of workers and according to its CEO Lukas Biewald, they hire up to 10.000 people per hour and up to 3 years of work per day ¹ The pending lawsuit is now challenging the companies failure to pay the minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act to its US workforce and Christopher Otey’s lawyers are searching the web for other underpaid members of the online crowd who want to join the class action. CrowdFlower’s lawyers point out, however, that Christopher Otey did his work completely voluntarily and that he and all the other ‘cloud-workers’ are not employees but free contractors. The case is still open, but it has the potential to shake the foundations of a business model that has been mushrooming around the globe over the last five years. According to the Crowdsourcing Industry Report, the sector is doubling its workforce and rising its revenues by 75 per cent each year. The revenues of the platform owners that is. The workers earn between $1.40 and $2 per hour, depending on the platform, the job and their experience — the quicker they work, the more they earn — but on average, the income is below the minimum wage of Beijing and a far cry from the US minimum wage of $7.25. As the report also points out: “… more than half of all the crowdsourcing workers live in North America and Europe and workers are generally very well educated. Almost half have a bachelor degree and only 5% are truly low skills workers.” ²
How to come to terms with crowdsourcing? To some it is just a neutral umbrella term describing various forms of distributing labour; to others it stands for the exploitation of cheap or free labour with detrimental effects on workers and professions. But can crowdsourcing be described as exploitative even when all participants are volunteers and know the conditions? Is it still labour when people do it as a hobby? Is crowdsourcing inherently unethical or is it just a question of how the parameters are configured? And how does it effect the design profession?

Buy it, use it, break it, fix it,
trash it, change it, mail – upgrade it,
charge it, point it, zoom it, press it,
snap it, work it, quick – erase it,
write it, cut it, paste it, save it,
load it, check it, quick – rewrite it,
plug it, play it, burn it, rip it,
drag and drop it, zip – unzip it,
lock it, fill it, call it, find it,
view it, code it, jam – unlock it,
surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it,
cross it, crack it, switch – update it,
name it, rate it, tune it, print it,
scan it, send it, fax – rename it,
touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it,
turn it, leave it, stop – format it.

Daft Punk, Technologic, 2005

From the Empowerment of the User to the Harnessing of the Crowd

Every day, we click our way through an endless succession of micro-tasks. Surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it. Isolated, these are almost meaningless but in aggregated form they create data of great value. It is well known that the services of Google, Facebook and the like are not actually free, but payed for with personal data and attention. In other words, the users are the product being sold to advertisers. With the accusation of exploitation already looming, Nicholas Carr has described Facebook’s business model as ‘digital sharecropping’. ³ He refers to Facebook’s average yearly revenue per user, which was at $5,11 in 2011. Not much for a single user, but after all, they got a billion of them. However, as puzzling as it might be that so many users prefer selling out their privacy instead of paying a small maintenance fee, I wouldn’t describe Facebook’s business-model as exploitative. The value creation by the users happens as a side-effect of their activities and in return they get a service that has a high value for them. In the case of Google’s search it is even harder to imagine paying with real cash instead of data and attention.
Write it, cut it, paste it, save it. These tasks are already more demanding because they revolve around the creation of content, be it for self-expression or as a service to others. Amateurs online write articles for Wikipedia, moderate help forums, debug open source software and make valuable contributions to sciences from astronomy to ornithology. With increasing complexity, these tasks stop being micro and demand a high level of engagement and expertise. They eventually become indistinguishable from work. As portmanteaus such as prosuming ⁴,  produsage ⁵, playbour ⁶ or pro-am ⁷ have tried to express the lines between amateur and professional, between play and labour have been continuously blurred. Crowdsourcing harvests the whole spectrum of these hybrid activities and it’s what makes the valuation of appropriate remuneration so tricky. The criticism of amateur work online used to circle around its supposedly low quality ⁸, but the more relevant question is actually who is entitled to make a profit from all the free contributions.
The concept of user-generated content was central to the so called Web 2.0. The new version of the internet, so it was said, had become more emancipatory and collaborative. But what actually united the new breed of commercial websites that arose from the ashes of the dotcom crash was that they all found ways to let the users produce the content. In the case of Amazon, they already contributed ratings, reviews and recommendations. With the launch of Second Life in 2003 and, most importantly, YouTube in 2005 the concept was elevated to a new level. Now, the users also created the core product. Wikipedia had already started in 2001, but it was between 2004 and 2006 that it was growing exponentially. All this contributed to a great hype about the empowerment of the user, which peaked in 2006 when Time magazine made You the Person of the Year: “The new Web is … a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. … It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing.” ⁹ As it turned out, half of this was an illusion. While people do indeed help each other for free, the power seems to be back firmly in the hands of the few. The users had much more control over their data and content on their private home pages, before they handed over everything to the global aggregators and the individual users transformed into the crowd.

The Reinvention of the Crowd

In the nineteenth century, a crowd was still an unruly gathering with a dynamic that could quickly turn a group of cheering spectators into a raging mob. In 1895 Gustave Le Bon established the field of crowd psychology with The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. The sociologist was convinced that the sum of people would always be less then its parts: “Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction.” ¹⁰ With the spectre of democracy haunting Europe, the question for Le Bon was how to keep the crowd at bay and influence it in favour of those in power; part of his study therefore reads like a manual for crowd manipulation. Occupy Wall Street, the London Riots and the Arab Spring are recent examples that this archetypal crowd still exists. Since the turn of this century, however, the revolutionary crowd in the street has been supplemented by the docile crowd online, productively clicking in the hours. The challenge is not anymore how to suppress its destructive power but how to harness its collective intelligence. This paradigm shift was partly triggered in 2004 by James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds – How the Many are Smarter then the Few. Backed by an array of research from various fields he argued that Le Bon had things exactly backwards: If you put together a large and diverse enough group its decisions will over time be intellectually superior to any isolated expert. ¹¹ And as the success of GNU/Linux and the Wikipedia had shown by now, online communities were not only capable of solving complex tasks, the contributors were also willing to do the job for free.
In 2006, journalist Jeff Howe labeled this new form of labour online for Wired: “Welcome to the age of the crowd, where … distributed labor networks are using the Internet to exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains. … The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.” ¹² Clearly, this was not about the empowerment of the user anymore. Now that aggregation on a massive scale had become possible, experts started thinking about how to put this yet to be exploited resource to good use.

Human Spare Cycles

Attempts to fathom the potential quickly led to astronomic calculations. In Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators, Clay Shirky estimated that “the world’s educated population has three trillion hours of free time each year.” ¹³ In contrast, it is said that it took ‘only’ about 100 million hours to create the Wikipedia. What could be achieved if only people would waste less time in front of the TV and devote their free time to more productive causes? Along these lines, the game-designer and author Jane McGonigal has pointed to the total number of hours people played World of Warcraft, which in 2011 accumulated to 5.93 million years. Her solution is to make the world more game like and to create games that tackle real world problems such as health and sustainability. ¹⁴ However, this so called ‘gamification’ cuts both ways. Not only makes it games more work like, the introduction of points, badges and other virtual incentives can be very manipulative. It  propels competition and ambition among the workers and transforms the feeling of loss of time into a feeling of achievement and progress. ¹⁵ It has become a tool in crowdsourcing to ‘pay’ the contributors without having to give them cash, which is why media philosopher Ian Bogost has suggested to better speak of ‘exploitationware’. ¹⁶
Luis von Ahn, researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a very special from of harnessing the ‘cognitive surplus’. He is the inventor of reCAPTCHA, those distorted letters that we have to type in whenever we create a new account online to prove that we are human. When we type in those words we recognise a fragment of a book-scan that a computer could not decipher. Von Ahn says he is treating “human brains as processors in a distributed system, each performing a small part of a massive computation.” ¹⁷ The curious thing about Ahn’s method of crowdsourcing is, that people often don’t even realise that they perform ‘human computation’.
The aggregation of usage data, unconsciously performed micro-tasks and even user-generated content are all examples for crowdsourcing in a broader sense. In a narrow sense, as outlined by Howe, it means replacing employees with precarious crowd workers. Criticism not only comes from those threatened by it. In 2007, Jimmy Wales described crowdsourcing as a “vile way of looking at the world. This idea that a good business model is to get the public to do your work for free — that’s just crazy. It disrespects the people. It’s like you’re trying to trick them into doing work for free.” ¹⁸ This might come as a surprise from Wales, after all, the Wikipedia was built on free contributions. But the essential difference is that as with open source software, the volunteer work done by the community creates a free resource for the commons. While in crowdsourcing, the creators often have no direct use for their contributions and even hand over their intellectual property rights. The open process ends with a closure and the sole beneficiary is someone outside of the community. The use of the term crowd reflects this outside perspective. A crowd is other people.

Core Methods of Crowdsourcing: Micro-tasking vs. Contests

Crowdsourcing is sometimes used by companies as a one-off marketing stunt to engage customers with a brand and it can also serve as a market research tool. But in its narrow sense, it has become a business in its own right. Specialised companies cultivate permanent communities of online workers, not unlike beehives, and offer their workforce to external clients. The methods for orchestrating the workforce of the hive vary greatly. Some owners install incentives for collaborative behaviour such as ‘Karma points’, others foster competition. Many offer non-monetary ‘gamification’ incentives that give the contributors reputation inside the community, others actually pay their workers. But since the crowd is by definition not restricted in numbers while the sum of money that is being paid for a job certainly is, it is not possible that everybody gets paid in full. When money is involved, there are essentially two different models: Either, the workers receive micro-payment for solving repetitive micro-tasks, for example, they get a cent for each item they categorise. Or there is a contest, or a gamble, in which the workers all do the same job but only one is getting paid eventually. This second model is used when the work is more complex and time consuming and can’t easily be split in tiny units, as it is usually the case with design tasks.
CrowdFlower.com, the company now faced with the class action law suit, is a typical example for the micro-payment model. So is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, named after the historic chess robot that was operated by a human, hidden inside the machine. Amazon accordingly describes its service as ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ and it addresses the same sort of problems as Luis von Ahn with his human computation, fine grained repetitive tasks that computers aren’t very good at. The most baffling application of micro-tasking is probably Soylent, the ‘word processor with a crowd inside’. It is a plug for text editors that allows authors to assign parts of their writing to the crowd of ‘Mechanical Turkers’ for correction or shortening without even having to leave the programme. ¹⁹ Tellingly, the name is derived from the apocalyptic science fiction film Soylent Green. It shows a world suffering from extreme overpopulation in which the popular and nutritious snack Soylent Green turns out to be made of humans —  a delicate way to deal with the crowd …

Let Them Design Logos

As it turns out, logo design in particular lends itself to the contests model. There are now dozens of so called ‘logo mills’ such as CrowdSpring.com and DesignCrowd.com. A particular large one, 99designs.com, claims to be ‘the fasted growing design market-place in the world’. It has more than 200,000 registered designers and it already conducted over 180,000 design contests. Even though the site boasts many numbers, the pricing scheme of 99designs is deliberately opaque so it is not directly visible that the site takes a share of 40 to 45 per cent. From the initial $300 that a client is paying for a logo contest, the platform takes off $120 right away. The client gets on average 116 logos, which leaves the designers with  a chance of 1 in 116 to eventually getting paid $180. The average renumeration comes down to about $1.50 per logo design, before taxes. There are higher paying contest for things more complex, but the average money paid out per design on 99designs still is only $2. Since designing a logo usually takes significantly longer then an hour, the designs on offer can only be derivative, of low quality or the contributing designers work for even far less then their colleagues toiling away in the micro-payment sweatshops. It is, by the way, the external client that decides who wins and if anyone will get paid at all. 99designs offers a 100% money back guarantee if the client doesn’t like the results.
At first sight, there are some similarities here with the notorious pitches in architecture. As Rem Koolhaas pointed out: “It is a complete drain of intelligence. I don’t know of any other profession that would tolerate this. … we invite your thinking, but we also announce that there is an eighty per cent chance that we will throw it away and make sure that it is completely wasted.” ²⁰ But there are important differences; in case of design crowdsourcing, it is not just a handful of selected studios competing for one prestigious job that will eventually be paid properly. Instead, hundreds of designers complete a badly paid job beforehand, there is no contract and no client afterwards. But Koolhaas has an important point here: the ethical problem lies not only in the low average wages but especially in the systemic waste of effort and creativity.
There are other crowdsourcing models, also in the design world, in which the contributors become shareholders of the products they help to create (Quirky.com) ²¹ and others, in which the cash rewards in a contest are significantly higher and the community decides who will get them (Jovoto.com), or where the community works on partly social projects (OpenIDEO.com). In other words, there are possibilities to at least mitigate the hardship of crowdsourcing to some extent. A system such as that of 99designs, however, in which the workers have to gamble for their remuneration, where they have a 1% chance to get paid for their labour while the organisers make a 40% revenue in 100% of the cases, can only be called exploitative and unethical, and the fact that the true price calculation is hidden makes this even more clear. There are initiatives such as No!Spec (no-spec.com) that try to prevent designers from participating in so called speculative work, but it is unlikely that these modes of production are going away. There is just too much profit to be made by the platform owners and too much desperation or naivety among those who participate. Even if Christopher Otey should win his case against CrowdFlower, a national class action lawsuit will not be enough against such a global phenomenon, especially if the crowd chooses to be exploited in that way, instead of revolting against it.
[This is a revised and condensed version of a paper that was originally published as part of the research track of the transmediale 2013 BWPWAP – Back When Pluto was a Planet – and can be found here: A Peer Reviewed Journal About #BWPWAP.]

Back in the summer of 2006, the journalist Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing to describe a new mode of production on the Internet. Howe wasn’t the first one trying to give it a name, but it was his coinage that came out on top. The teaser for his original article in Wired read: “Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.” 2006 was also the year when the idea of so called Web 2.0 gained momentum. A common claim was made that it was the individual user who would now control the Internet. The enthusiasm reached its peak when in December, Time magazine made You the Person of the Year. In the years since Howe filed his article, the actual applications of crowdsourcing, however, raise the question who really is in charge?

A crowd is other people

The last time that so much attention was given to the term crowd was in the 19th century, when Europe’s masses were pressing into the cities. Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841, is a classic example of how the crowd was seen back then. It was not until 2004 that the meaning of the term got a thorough reassessment in James Surowiecki book The Wisdom of Crowds: How the Many are Smarter than the Few. He turned the popular believe upside down by showing that under certain conditions, the crowd could actually be wise and productive. Jeff Howe then took up the idea of the productive crowd and described new business-models built on that principle online. Various business gurus followed Howe’s lead, all trying to find ways to best make use of the crowd online. Since around 2006, the usage of the term crowd has changed and it is now more popular then ever, a sought after resource — what remains is its inherent power structure: The crowd always means them, as in let them eat cake, never us as a community of peers.

Let them design logos

Today, crowdsourcing is widely used in spheres from ornithology to astronomy, from coding to design. In many fields, it is indeed a productive way to orchestrate the efforts of amateurs and professionals in order to create accumulative and generally accessible knowledge. Wikipedia is a good example of this. Things get problematic in ethical terms, however, as soon as the work of the many benefits only the few. It gets even more questionable when the same work is done a hundred-fold, when it becomes a feature of the system, that 99% of the work is unpaid and redundant and when the results of the work are neither useful for the majority of creators nor for the public. All this is usually the case with crowdsourcing in design, in particular with so called ‘logo mills’ such as CrowdSpring.com or designenlassen.de. The largest among a dozen of these platforms specialised on the crowdsourcing of logo-design is 99designs.com. The fast growing site has now more than 194,000 registered designers and has already conducted over 176,000 design contests. Typically, a client is paying $300 per logo contest, and gets on average 116 different finished designs for that money. The plattform takes off a 40% margin, leaving $180 for the one designer who, by a chance of 116 to 1, will get paid for the work. For the client, $300 is already a very low price for a logo, but for the designer, the average price comes down to less than $2 per design. What is potentially a powerful tool to coordinate the collective intelligence of a community turns out to be an even more powerful mechanism for the exploitation and waste of unpaid labour on a massive scale.

Works cited:
• Howe, Jeff. The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired, June 14, 2006.
• Howe, Jeff. Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. London: Random House Business, 2009.
• Mackay, Charles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Ware: Wordsworth Reference, 1995.
• Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few. London: Abacus, 2005.
• Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. London: Atlantic, 2008.

The economic Wunderkind
Founded in 2009 by Ben Kaufman, Quirky is already the third company of the now 25-year-old whizz-kid. Still in his school years, economic Wunderkind Kaufman convinced his parents to re-mortgage the family home in order to finance the foundation of Mophie, a company specialising in accessories for iPhones and iPods. Here Kaufman began with great success to involve users in the generation of new product ideas, which contributed to the rapid growth of the company. In 2007 he sold the company, by now a multi-million dollar concern, in order to fully dedicate himself to the principle of collective product design. He then founded Kluster, a company for collaboration software, followed by Quirky, his greatest success so far. Numerous videos of Kaufmann are available online where he advertises his firm and its products in euphoric and blatant style. In these he quite often appears to have sprung up from a teleshopping channel and indeed, he would have little difficulty convincing even a hardcore carnivore of the advantages of a new vegetable chopping tool in next to no time. Indeed, Quirky did for a time have its own television show, where Kaufman was able to give full rein to his relentless marketing talent. Spin is, after all, one of the tools of the trade. But there is much more to it than that.

Set theory
In 2006 the editor of the magazine Wired, Jeff Howe, coined the term “crowdsourcing”, which has by now asserted itself universally as a description for platforms such as Quirky. In the influential article The Rise of Crowdsourcing and the subsequent book ¹ Howe, based on examples such as iStockphoto (in contrast to Getty Images) and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, developed the hypothesis that the future of cheap work no longer lay in outsourcing to India, but in making use of the abundant cerebral capacities of the online “crowd”. Howe speaks of this abundance in terms of “spare cycles” while the Internet guru Clay Shirky calls the phenomenon “cognitive surplus” ². Seen from this perspective, a potential cerebral capacity, which had previously gone to waste in front of the television, is now recognised as a resource. Multiple tasks that were once dealt with by a clearly defined group of employees can now, thanks to technological progress, be outsourced by opening up to the “online community”: the Wikipedia principle, applied to everything, and to the creative sector in particular.

How well this can in fact work is anything but self-evident, and this in two respects: on the one hand it seemed surprising that so many people would make their ways of thinking, their creativity and their technical skills available quasi for free, and on the other, the idea that something of quality could arise in this way contradicted the prevailing cliché of the mindless consumer masses. After all, this had always been the province of well-paid experts, of sought-out professionals, not arbitrary amateurs. In 2004 in The Wisdom of Crowds ³ journalist James Surowiecki had already attempted to clear up these mistaken assumptions. Based on a number of examples from the world of science he had shown that under certain conditions and for particular tasks the crowd always comes up with better solutions than individual experts. These conditions include a group, which is as large and heterogeneous as possible, actors with utmost independence and a decentralised organisation structure. If these factors are not given, it can quickly result in so-called “group thinking”, a dynamic whereby the end result falls far below the potential of each individual because of the knock-on effect of erroneous decisions. This “herd instinct” is also what frequently leads to speculative bubbles, e.g., “tulip mania” or the “dot-com bubble”. But the “crowd” is in itself neither naive nor wise; everything depends on the organisation of processes. Surowiecki’s book marks an important turning point in the perception of the “crowd” – from the angry mob on the street ⁴ or the passive mass of hermits  ⁵ glued to the television up to the industrious free online workforce ⁶ – and indirectly serves as a detailed instruction manual for effective crowdsourcing.

What Tom Sawyer and a beekeeper have in common
The neatest literary example of the principle of crowdsourcing comes from Mark Twain. His hero, Tom Sawyer, accomplished the famous feat of making the task entrusted to him – he was supposed to whitewash a fence – so attractive and exclusive that his friends competed, even paid him, for the honour of completing his work for him. It is therefore no surprise that the crowdsourcing phenomenon is often associated with exploitation, even when all the participants know what they are letting themselves in for. This is especially evident in the field of graphic design, for instance on platforms such as crowdspring, 99designs or designenlassen. These websites enable commercial clients to receive hundreds of logo designs from a crowd of designers eager to work for minimal sums of around 200 euros – including a complete abdication of usage rights. Ultimately only one design at most is paid for – 99 designs are quasi free. Like beekeepers, the operators of these platforms supply only the infrastructure, the hive, into which the crowd of busy designers feeds its accumulated creative output voluntarily, and always in the hope of making a profit. From the customer’s point of view therefore, the value of a logo is around 50 cents – the chance of actually also being paid for a design is a hundred to one. The added value for the participating designers is therefore limited: they are mostly just supplied to penny-pinchers who then choose at random from the mass of designs.

However, Quirky’s programme differs significantly from these examples of crowdsourcing in graphic design, in that the platform in fact actively helps the participating designers and inventors to overcome numerous hurdles that the individual would find difficult to master. And for every productive contribution to a successful product there is a chance of real, ongoing profit sharing.

Gyro Gearloose and his 648 helpers
The fact that Quirky offers its users genuine added value quickly becomes apparent when one speaks to Awesemo, the inventor of the Verseur wine opener and proud red dot award winner. Angelo Caccione, as he is known in civilian life, is 33 years old and works mainly in London’s catering industry. Although he started out as a dishwasher, Caccione always wanted to be an inventor just like his grandfather in Italy, who was invariably to be found in his garage working on new ideas.

Even as a child, I was always taking things apart and studying them. I filed my first patent – for a special baby bottle – at the age of 21, but at the time I had no idea how to deal with manufacturers, dealers and sales and distribution. In the end, another companies brought my idea on to the market.

Thanks to Quirky, the path from the first idea to seeing the product on the shelf has become much shorter. Caccione has already filed 74 ideas since he discovered the platform in autumn 2010 and he has accompanied and influenced many more designs on their way to product maturity. Today, his portrait photo graces the packaging of Verseur, but he is not the only one to have worked on the development of the corkscrew. The package insert for the product lists the names of a total of 648 collaborators from the Quirky community. The share of the so-called influencers is shown in percentages, even down to the thousandth part. Caccione’s part is estimated at 35.20 per cent, followed by Gary Vaynerchuck (20 per cent), who came up with the original design brief, and David Yakos (3.79 per cent), who contributed to the name of the product. Added to that is the Quirky design team, the members of which are however not listed by name on the packaging.

It remains to be seen who will accept the coveted prize in Essen, but Caccione suspects that it will be Ben Kaufman himself. This would be fine, he explains, because the Quirky design team did in fact do most of the work and contributed substantially to the development of the original design ⁷. Willingness to compromise is therefore essential, and Caccione is convinced that he would have not been able to develop his product idea to market maturity on his own because he lacked the contacts, the necessary manufacturing expertise and above all the start-up capital. At Quirky, by contrast, there is a token charge of just ten dollars to submit an idea.

The process
Every week Quirky receives hundreds of ideas, which are then discussed and assessed by the community. The platform operators then compile the most popular of these into a shortlist of approximately a dozen proposals, which are then considered more closely. Recently, this evaluation phase has taken place publicly in the form of a weekly live stream – providing yet more proof of Quirky’s unusual openness. What is also impressive is the respect and trust that this gathering of some 60 noticeably youthful Quirky employees have in their dealings with one another – a community within the community.

Ben Kaufman himself hosts the discussions about the new ideas from a podium and analyses their usefulness and feasibility, the potential target groups and eventual similarities to other products on the market in an open dialogue with the team. The key question that always comes up is this: does this new idea provide a solution for a real problem? Nothing unnecessary should be added to the already existing flood of plastic rubbish. The process seems hard, but fair, and two products survive the weekly tribunal. During this step the rights are transferred to Quirky. It is now that the real work begins for the company’s internal team of experts. Prototypes are made and research is intensified, rights and patents are clarified, production costs are evaluated and manufacturers sought. The online community then has another opportunity to express itself. The opinion of the crowd is sought in relation to the product’s colour, name and packaging, its advertising tagline and retail price. In the final phase, Quirky then protects itself against non-sellers with a subscription model. The product only goes into production and distribution when enough potential customers have been found.
Quantity is key
At Quirky, the final step in the process of creating a product shares great similarities with kickstarter.com, that another major web platform that changes the product design processes with the help of the crowd. Here, the demand on the hive not only extends to time and creativity, but cash too. People who not only have an idea, but can also convincingly show that they have the necessary skills to realise their idea, can generate the crowd for the requisite start-up capital through Kickstarter. The so-called backers that are willing to financially support the idea presented by kickstarter.com secure their payment against a multilayered system of material and conceptual compensatory measures. The money however first flows when a predefined critical mass of start-up capital is reached. Only then can production begin. This pre-financing through customers or fans is, in and of itself, not a new invention. William Hogarth (1697–1764) was an early pioneer of the crowdfunding model, having developed a subscription scheme to finance his story cycle Marriage-à-la-Mode. He sold his supporters warrants in the form of caricatures, so to speak as pledges for the works still to be completed. The subscription or advance payment also came into use in the German book trade from the 18th century, in order to kick-start publications. And even Mozart organised commercial concerts on a subscription basis.

At the moment, Kickstarter is consistently breaking its own records. In February 2012, for instance, product designer Casey Hopkins was able to collect almost one and a half million dollars in order to produce his Elevation Dock, a slick aluminium iPhone charging dock. Unlike Quirky member Caccione, at Kickstarter Hopkins holds all the rights to his product. Accordingly, the potential gains are higher – as are the risks and amount of work. For experienced designers with business acumen, Kickstarter is therefore the better alternative. For part-time inventors and newcomers from other disciplines however, Quirky’s cost-benefit ratio is best. In addition to its own online shop, Quirky has numerous partnerships with large retail chains, above all in the USA. When Quirky sells a product online, 30 per cent of the income flows back to the community where it is divided between the inventors and helpers. If the sale is made through a retailer, the percentage is reduced to ten, but the quantities are then much larger.

Jake Zien, the other red dot award winner from Quirky, has already made over 200,000 dollars with his Pivot Power Surge Protector. Angelo Caccione is some way behind: so far, he has earned some 6,000 dollars through his contributions on the platform. He is nevertheless optimistic: soon, his Verseur will be on the shelves in Target, the second-largest retailer in the USA after Walmart, with over 1,000 branches. For each item sold Caccione receives just 30 cents, about one per cent of the retail price, but it is the quantity that makes the difference. He aims to keep catering on the back burner for the time being so that he can in future dedicate himself fully to his inventions. Verseur is meant to be the first large step towards this. Invention is to be more than just a hobby for him, more than it was for his grandfather, and thanks to Quirky Caccione feels that he is on the right path. “It is only because of Quirky that I have produced so many ideas”, explains Caccione.

Every single positive comment from the community means a lot to me. What I like so much about Quirky is the process, which pushes me on to become better and better.

Although Caccione thinks highly of Quirky, he is nonetheless critical. In his opinion, the platform’s biggest problem is the risk of the theft of ideas. He is therefore very cautious with his most valuable ideas and in the initial stages uses other websites such as EdisonNation ⁸, which are also open to everyone’s inventions, but which lack the open development process and the participation of the community. Here, all processes transpire behind closed doors and are therefore safer. Caccione states that on a number of occasions he has seen how ideas from the Quirky community were submitted on Kickstarter by a third party. Whether one should bring the crowd on board is therefore something that must be thoroughly considered – along with what one wants from the crowd: financing alone or also the actual further development of the product. Edison Nation is a black box for the inventor, whereas with Quirky one gets comprehensive and expert feedback, at least from the Quirky design team and the community, even when an idea is not developed. A file on the feasibility and market chances of a product that can also be very useful for further development beyond the platform. Even the perhaps initially painful experience that the perceived ingenious invention is received with little enthusiasm can be valuable, in that it protects the inventor from unrealistic failed investments.

Platforms such as Quirky and Kickstarter make it easier than ever for product designers with good ideas to bring their products into the marketplace, and the crowd plays a very important role in this. While crowdfunding is meanwhile a highly effective way of overcoming the obstacle of start-up capital, Quirky not only assumes its members’ rights, but also takes on all the other steps on the difficult path to the end product. In the process, the company is highly skilled at minimising the risk of failed investments by involving the crowd at all the decision-making levels, while keeping the reins firmly in hand at all times. Unlike crowdsourcing in graphic design, all the participants here gain something from their collaboration. What Quirky’s impact is on the design world in general is a matter of speculation. It is no coincidence that Quirky is currently focusing on simple domestic appliances without integrated circuits. With a growing level of complexity in the products, the development cycles will probably become too long and the community management process too cumbersome. However, the production principle could catch on. Even if the products that are currently produced in this way are not necessarily revolutionary, the process is that without a doubt.

All photos provided by Quirky.
Many thanks to Angelo for his time and his openness.

The article was originally written in German for bauhaus issue 3 Things in May 2012 under the title:
Hive – From production for the masses to design by the masses

Figure used to ward of malevolent spirits, painted wood, Nicobar Islands, Bay of Bengal, 1880-1925, Photo: Wellcome Library, London

When entering the dimly lit interior of the Wellcome Collection with its wooden panelling for the first time, it is easy to get carried away by the plethora of weird and wonderful objects on open display. Exhibited inside glass cabinets these visible but untouchable artefacts take the spectator into the obscure and esoteric world of the ‘Medicine Man’. In here, the tools of the medical trade still allow no clear delineation between the functional and the spiritual, between science and art. Grouped loosely around large issues such as ‘The Beginning of Life’, the heterogenous exhibits seem to stem not just from an other world but from as many other worlds as there are objects. There is one thing though, that they all have in common: their close connection to the human body.  All artefacts deal with the visible and invisible threats to our well being. This holds true for the brutal looking forceps and saws displayed in the vitrine ‘Metal Instruments’, which were used to operate inside the opened human body, as well as for the Peter Pan like wooden figure in the vitrine ‘Seeking Help’, which served to ward off malevolent spirits before they could do any harm; a metaphysical firewall against invisible threats.

It is probably only now, after having explored the openly displayed tools of treatment and torture, that one might, on closer inspection, have a look inside the closed wooden drawers that are tucked in neatly into the wall, under the same wooden veneer that the whole cabinet of curiosities is embedded in. Hidden from direct sight and protected from the light, a small collection of delicate prints can be discovered here by the curious visitor. One particularly interesting etching in this closet is made by the British caricaturist William Heath, published in 1828 under the title ‘Monster Soup’ ⁠. The illustration depicts a bourgeoise lady spilling her cup of tea in a state of shock, confronted with microscopic revelations about the quality of the water that presumably was the source for her tea. In a parallel montage the artist shows on the left side of the image what the Thames water is used for, in this case tea, and on the right side what it consists of, a myriad of malevolent life forms that breed and dwell in it; A biosphere usually invisible to the human eye and revealed only through the technology of the microscope. The top caption of the print reads: ‘Microcosm dedicated to the London Water Companies. Brought forth all monstrous, all prodigious things, hydras and organs, and chimeras dire.’ At the bottom, a subtitle states: ‘Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water being a correct representation of that precious stuff doled out to us!’.

Engraving: ‘A Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water’ by William Heath, London 1828, Photo: Wellcome Library, London

The caricature was a reaction to the particularly critical situation in water supply that London was suffering from at the time of publication. Only three years later, the city experienced its first outbreak of cholera. The poignant sarcasm in the captions points to the helplessness and passivity of the people at the receiving end of the water supply. They have to trust the source without being able to see with their own eyes what they have to consume. The citizens are at the mercy of the private suppliers and can only rely on experts from science, or in this case, on a caricaturist, to reveal the invisible threats delivered as a commodity to their homes.

This specific form of revelation that William Heath pursued with his etching almost 200 years ago has a very contemporary counterpart which is only slightly less scary than the contamination of our drinking water. In October 2011, the influential conservative German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) made a similar move: Over several full pages of its widely read Sunday issue, it printed the source-code of a particular nasty piece of malware, the so called ‘Staatstrojaner’ or ‘State-Trojan’. A tiny piece of software that was designed by a private company, DigiTask GmbH, as a commission for the German federal police in order to infiltrate the computers of suspects. The program not only empowers state organs to record emails and listen to Skype-conversations, it can also send screenshots of the suspects computer to the prosecutors in real time. Furthermore, probably the moment where to drop the cup of tea, it enables whomever has control over the program, to download the whole hard drive and, most importantly, to remotely upload files and even further malware at will. In other words: evidence can be produced and placed wherever and whenever needed without the suspect having the slightest idea of what is going on under the bright and shiny surface of its desktop. The green meadows covering the operating system would show no traces, no footprints of the invaders.

Thanks to the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), a hacker organisation that, in spite of its misleading name stands up for civil rights, constitutionality and privacy of data (Datenschutz), the Staatstrojaner with its wide political implication was brought to daylight. Without this tech-savvy group of geeks and nerds, who are usually seen as outsiders and renegades, even as threats to society, the public would be as oblivious to the state-malware as our tea drinking lady would be to the sprawling life in her teacup without the help of the microscope. Frank Rieger, spokesman of the CCC and one of the hackers who exposed the malware explains the discovery in the FAZ under the descriptive headline: ‘Anatomy of a digital pest’. Indeed the parallels between the biological viruses, parasites and worms that live in our bodies and their digital counterparts that infest the nervous system of our personal computers are striking. Or, as Frank Rieger puts it: ‘Analyzing malware can be compared to dissecting an unknown species. The idea is to identify individual functions, like eyes, ears, the respiratory system, the cardiovascular system, the intestines or vocal apparatus’. The vivisection of the still fully functional specimen under scrutiny was programmed so recklessly, that not only the police but any knowledgeable hacker could take advantage of the loquacious intruder. Instead of protecting its citizens against harm, the German police had not only broken the law, it eventually rendered its suspects defenceless against all kinds of criminal cyber-attacks.

State-trojan in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 9.10.2011, Photo: Benjamin Fischer

It is already a peculiar circumstance, that a conservative newspaper teams up with the seemingly ‘chaotic’ hackers to undeceive the public about the governments use of malware. Even more noteworthy is the editors decision to print the actual code over five full pages. By making it an ‘open source’ in that way, the FAZ made it readable to everybody, deliberately shocking its readership, while at the same time pointing to a new form of illiteracy that has become a serious problem in our society. We are embedded in code, computers are ubiquitous in our lives, they control our lives, code is law, it is of utter importance. But still, even when it is spread out in the Sunday paper, the vast majority of people has not the slightest idea what these lines mean. They might as well be written in ancient Greek or Latin. ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ Who is watching the watchmen?. As with the classic form of illiteracy, early schooling in programming languages could, in the long run, contribute a solution to the problem. But still, it will remain highly unrealistic that a majority of the population will be able or willing to keep up with the ever increasing speed and complexity of technological development. There is not much more then the belief that, while we touch the sensitive surfaces of our ubiquitous quasi-magical devices in awe, someone will take care of their integrity and ward off malevolent spirits. Since governments not only in Germany have disqualified themselves of this guarding role it becomes ever more important to promote the ideas of the open-source movement and to support independent groups of experts like the CCC to watch the watchman and to illuminate the secret life of our devices.

After closing the drawer with the ‘Monster Soup’, when leaving the ‘Medicine Man’ through the nearby glass door, the visitor finds himself in the exhibition ‘Medicine Now’; far from being a dimly lit cabinet, this part of the Wellcome Collection is a brightly light, aseptic representation of the modern day, purely scientific approach to medicine. No magic lurking under the surface here. But in a huge white floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of white ring binders, the visitor can have a look into his own source-code printed on paper. With its three billion letters in 119 volumes The ‘Library of the Human Genome’, points at the future strands of code and hacking.

Human Genome Volume One, Designed by Kerr Noble for the Wellcome Collection 2005, Photo: Wellcome Library, London

This article was originally published in Unmaking Things: A Design History Studio.
It got an honourable mention in the Core77 Design Awards in the category Writing & Commentary.