Some of you might have received this greeting card these days. The visual is nice, but there’s much more behind it: the card results from a creative contest. In other words: I used the internet to ask people to design me a greeting card, it’s called “crowdsourcing”. There are a lot of websites for this: 99designs (Australia), Creads (France), Crowdspring (USA), 12designer (Germany), JadeMagnet (India)…  A lot of them have communities of designers, both amateurs and professionals, located in the whole world. Actually, one of these websites, the Chinese Zhubajie, could be considered as the largest employer in the world, with more people than the Peoples’ Liberation Army of China or Walmart-Stores in the USA!

Such creative contests are increasingly used by companies to outsource creative work, to look for innovative ideas, to seek inspiration… It’s a fascinating research topic that I would like to explore, and that’s why I started my PhD-work about creative “crowdsourcing” this year. So, what is “crowdsourcing”?

Crowdsourcing is the act of […] taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call (Howe, 2006) Continue reading →