RedesignMe WebLog

Join the RedesignMe hyves and share the co-creation message with your friends!

RedesignMe will join this year’s PIMRC conference in Cannes, France on 16 September 2008. Stephen Wolak of Vodafone Group asked me to be part of a panel during the conference.The panel will discuss the subject: “Collaborative Innovation: Good for Business?”.

Abstract: “Open Innovation and Collaborative Innovation have attracted a lot of coverage in recent years, particularly with the publication of Don Tapscott’s book “Wikinomics”. What does collaborative innovation mean for large corporations? Is collaborative innovation good for traditional businesses? How can corporations collaborate and differentiate? Come along to the panel and hear leading experts in this field discuss these issues.” 

More info here. 

Unfortunately our website was not reachable today for a couple of hours. This was due to problems at our access provider Claranet.nl. A heavy duty cable was damaged by workers and this left the entire High Tech Campus without an internet connection for 4 hours. This was a good moment for us to start thinking about a distributed server system. Btw. We laughed our asses off when we saw the advertisement of Claranet on their website. Zero-downtime eh?

As our online community is starting to grow we needed a better overview of who’s who. That’s why we updated the Redesigners section. As you can see we also introduced a level system. People who earn RDMs rise in level. Last but not least we added a “My website” field and a “About Me” field to your profile page. So now you can tell other Redesigners a little bit about yourself!

Once in a while we track back to blogs that write about crowdsourcing, co-creation or RedesignMe in general. It’s good to see that more and more people (and companies!) are learning the benefits of crowd-sourcing and it’s good to realise we are at the beginning of this new era. 

Blogger Ashlee Simmons writes today: “I ran across something else today that ties in with crowdsourcing. I heard about a new company called RedesignMe, which pays users to critique, design and help to build communications tools. I’ve heard of sites that pay you to comment, post, write and brainstorm, but this is very new and exciting.Who wouldn’t love to be paid for helping out? Crowdsourcing is great, I think. I am very pro-let the crowd help out. That said, I don’t like the downside of crowdsourcing, which usually means low pay. I can see the benefit for companies, but it’s not fair to workers.”

I partially agree with Ashlee on the downside of Crowdsourcing. We shouldn’t overlook the long term effects of the efforts of the crowds, which really do pay back but not by means of money but by means of less frustrating products and also the feeling of actually having participated in the creation of something big. 

Today we are featured on www.springwise.com . They write: “This is where Generation C(ontent) becomes Generation C(ash), and it’s where crowdsourcing will reach its true potential. Companies benefit from the wisdom of the crowds, the crowds benefit with rewards and better products—and sites like RedesignMe benefit from facilitating it all. One to emulate on a niche or localized basis!” Thanks for the attention guys!

While co-creation & crowdsourcing are the new buzz-words, collective design efforts have been studied longer than many of us might know. While visiting the museum of architecture in Barcelona I stumbled upon an exposition of Peter Smithson, an architect who died a few years ago. He wrote many books about architecture and also wrote about collective design. Here’s an excerpt from one of his books:

Collective design:

“The invention and perfection of collective activities, firstly to placate and subdue reality, and then to invest it with deeper and deeper levels of meaning and satisfactions, comes naturally to man.The temple, for example, was designed by one set of men as a long-lasting embodiment of an idea, capable of being given extension of meaning or tokens of renewal by quite other sets of men long after the initiators were dead. These elaborations were sometimes almost as long-lasting as the main structure itself, sometimes they were only for the day or the hour….each was made in the acknowledgement of the others.For some years now, most buildings have seemed to exclude other people’s specializations; and certainly, in the city-center, motor-cars having occupied the whole of the space between buildings. Motor-cars have themselves become almost the only other participation design specialization in the public arena.In this sad circumstance there has arisen a strange interpretation of the general disquiet of the many, and the active wish of a few to get back into that arena. Some have suggested that people should build their own houses from a kit of crude parts and that this is how they can involve themselves into the design process. But to what level has the architect’s specialization fallen if all we can now suggest is orthogonal Lego?”

- Peter Smithson (1973)

Quite daunting, isn’t it?

This week we are featured in the “Site gespot” area on Frankwatching.com.

An interesting read from EVERYBODY interested or involved in product design. http://www.goodproductmanager.com/ 

Today we’ve put up a new RDM Challenge initiated by our client “DECT forum”. They have introduced a new wireless technology called CAT-iq and are currently in the product concept phase. DECT started a design competition for designers and design students to get new concepts. Through our RDM Challenge they would like to gain insights from non designers as well. Now is your chance to have a say in the product roadmap by sharing your ideas. To start just react to the product concept presented in the RDM Challenge. You can earn 25 RDMs with your input and you can exchange the RDMs in our new RDM-shop. Have fun!! To the challenge.