The Bloggomist: Design in the Blood
Technology Opinion

To suggest that design should become more open and transparent isn’t to say that it should be an exclusively communal effort. Things run afoul with too many cooks in the kitchen, no matter what the industry. Even from within a company opinions from people with more power than sense can easily derail a good design process, and as a designer it can be surprisingly hard to maintain creative license.

Open source is not a new concept. We hear it all the time in reference to the software field, but its inherent qualities have already proven to be applicable far beyond this. Google’s new mobile software Android is a self-proclaimed answer to Apple’s tightly controlled iPhone, allowing open development of its apps, therefore if we were to look through this looking glass the other way it might give us an idea of how open-source design would work when it comes to a physical product. Crowdsourcing is usually the term applied to open-source principles outside of software, but there’s something awfully blunt about this term which suggests that the masses are to be used as a resource and not included in a dialogue. To a certain degree much of the corporate tapping of social media has been much more about taking than talking, but it need not be this way.

General Motors is a company that has obviously garnered its fair share of attention in recent months, but on this subject they have made a significant step in the right direction. The GM Lab is an online social focus group of sorts, but unlike many others it promotes interaction and sharing as well as an open line of discussion. While the suits at GM view this as a marketing gold mine the real value here is that the designers and the design process are the center of focus. The Lab allows GM to share projects and ideas and to connect people directly with the designers, which is refreshing when so much of this process is often so darkly shrouded. Of course there’s a reason for confidentiality when it comes to proprietary methods and technologies, but I do believe there is room to share creativity and ideas that won’t put market shares at risk; if anything, it’s a way of strengthening a brand rather than weakening it. There’s many more examples out there of this developing trend, and I think this is something that will become more widespread as companies start realizing the value in controlled transparency, rather than waiting until the last minute to see if the product they’re pushing has any relevancy in the real world.

When it comes down to it, exposing a way of thinking and putting the creative drivers at the forefront of a company’s image is a far more honest way of doing business, and we can then begin to identify with the people who created the product we’re about to buy. The alternative, of course, is the carefully orchestrated ‘ta-da’ reveal of a new product by one person or entity, as if to suggest it just magically appeared from the ether. This disengages us from the products we experience, and we therefore have a limited attachment to them instead of developing a sense of wonder.

There are many gaps that need to be bridged here and I have nothing but optimism that the companies who start opening up early will be the ones to move forward the most successfully in this new era of uncharted possibilities; a time when we will have closer relationships with those products that allow us to better experience everyday life.

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To see more from Leon Fitzpatrick, visit: http://evilmonito.com/author/leon/

Published on 18 November 2009 | |