Design by Community or Committee?

Over the spring and summer, we ran a campaign called ‘Design by Community’, in which members of the Nokia blog’s com­munity voted for their ideal mobile phone, having been given some ideas of the con­straints that actually apply to manufacturers.

It was a massive success, with hundreds of thou­sands of votes cast and intense dis­cus­sions on the virtues of various design decisions. This piece was a slightly meddle­some and contrary reminder that asking the users is one part of the design process.

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There are two schools of thought when it comes to can­vassing other people’s opinions on designs, and they both have strong argu­ments behind them. Many of these were aired when we unveiled the draft sketches of the Design by Community concept device.

On the one hand, some people would prefer that design was left up to exper­i­enced, pro­fes­sional designers. After all, they’re trained and paid to do the job, and know how to balance the hardware require­ments with appear­ances. They are also respons­ible for having some sort of design vision, so that the whole thing fits together properly. What’s more, they might argue, if you ask 1000 people, then you’ll get 1000 answers and the product ends up com­prom­ised, trying to balance too many wishes at once. Design classics aren’t voted on, they say: they come from inspired vision and expertise.

Those are good points, but the other side of the story is that locking your designers in a room until they’ve come up with a new phone model isn’t going to work either. Phones aren’t just elec­tronic sculp­tures, they are also business ventures. If you haven’t done some homework, then your venture will fail. You need to know what people want from their phones, what’s seen as fash­ion­able and how much people are prepared to pay. You don’t need to be a slave to that, oth­er­wise nobody would ever come up with anything new, but in-​​depth market know­ledge is def­in­itely one ingredient of a suc­cessful new model.

The other thing to point towards is the power and cap­ab­ility of the Open Source movement. Most of the Internet is made by unpaid con­trib­utors sharing their know­ledge and craft for free, both the content and the tech­no­logy behind it. Wikipedia is arguably the greatest repos­itory of know­ledge that humanity has ever created, and it was done without payment. Large numbers of people can and do group together to produce really excel­lent things. Jimmy Wales might be the archi­tect of Wikipedia, but he hasn’t written a mean­ingful pro­por­tion of its content. It’s Encyclopedia by Community.

What I think is that the truth probably lies some­where between these extremes. Artistic vision and a tight focus are really important parts of product design. But so is under­standing, anti­cip­ating and researching what it is that people want. That’s a big part of why we wanted to conduct the Design by Community project. So we can unravel together the current state of people’s expect­a­tions, learn a little bit more about the ingredi­ents of a suc­cessful product and hope­fully influ­ence the path of future devices.

picture credit: arquera

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