Category Archives: Crowdmaking

Give the child a Cone: crowdmaking and the new age of enlightenment

I was happy to see a proper mass market IoT product come out of the music tech community. Aether’s Cone is an intelligent combination of web service-connected product, meaningful cloud content driven by intelligent music systems and gesture-driven personalisation training (check out how it works). It belongs to the world as described in both Cory Doctorow’s fictional Makers and Chris Anderson’s living community of Makers. These visions reflect our current reality. But they are still missing one vital element. Once we design intelligent products which plug into the cloud and which are wonderfully trained to cater for our personal needs and preferences, the most innovative space will happen when we *jointly* connect via our products. This means not only via an awkward touch-screen (essentially button-pressing) application, but by using a broader range of gesture and signalling. The best we can do for our new products is not just to enable them to respond to us, but to *talk to each other* via a common platform. This is at the core of crowdmaking.

Which brings me to the main reason why our age is so revolutionary compared to anything we, as experiential beings, have witnessed in the past. Colleagues from some of the cutting edge innovation teams from EU industry speak to me of the era of “New Enlightenment” – access to vast amounts of new knowledge gathered from intelligent data systems, which drives new, well-informed behaviours. There is definitely some truth in this. However there is a major difference between our age and a historic movement which flourished as a reaction to the oppression of individual opinion in the Middle Ages. Aided, as ever, by a technological leap (in this case the invention of the printing press), and hence dominated by the written word, better-informed personal opinion became not only possible, but strongly encouraged. It became the foundation of our education system. Most western education systems still insist on *discouraging doodling and tinkering* in favour of the written word. We (rightly or wrongly) trust *only* the written word when it comes to assurances and justice. We still carry the written word ethos which praises individualism to the extent that it has generated entire cultures and economic systems based on encouraging individual progress above the common good.

Our age has highlighted the benefits of a different form of behaviour – one that encourages collective intelligence. Unlike the Enlightenment’s individualist drip-feeding of personal knowledge, connected communities of the – so called – “new era of enlightenment” usefully moderate and collectively produce torrents of valuable information. Ideas of sharing and moderation prove to be more effective and more valuable than individual accumulation. The social revolution is not inherent in the digital medium, but transpires from new behaviours afforded through connectivity.

This collective intelligence is already heavily fuelled by visual imagery – which is historically where our mark-making communications started. Despite the dominance of the written word in school, our children spend most of their time using visual and gestural communication via tablets and robotic toys. We know they are already better at combining *gesture – signal – image – word* than we could ever be with the limitations of our training.

Gesture and signalling offer a vast range of affordances which can bypass the awkwardness of language, the slowness of typing, and the limitations of cross-cultural spoken language. Just watch children from different linguistic backgrounds interact. Some of their methods are truly ingenious. They seamlessly integrate gesture and available props, showing that tools are a much richer field of communication than boring flat tablets.

Now give the child a Cone. My guess is that the child will pick up the Cone and turn the dial vigorously wanting to influence *your* experience of it (wicked or fun as that may be). Why? Because we have always communicated via our tools. Now, watch what happens when we connect them.

Crowdmaking and the Sharing Economy

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In 1954 Paul Rand, the great American artist and typographer, placed a full page advertisement in the New York Times using Morse code. His thinking was that while a million eyes might see the paper that morning, the only eyes that mattered were those of General Sarnoff, President of the RCA Corporation, whose early career had begun as a wireless operator for Marconi and who had revealed that his proudest moment had been as one of the first operators to pick up the distress call from the Titanic. Rand’s objective was to win the RCA Corporation’s lucrative advertising contract for his agency. Later that morning the agency received a call from General Sarnoff’s office asking for a meeting.

Intelligent, targeted one-off solutions, can create as much economic impact as mass produced, widely disseminated products. The important thing is to assess each case scenario on its own terms and remember that one is sometimes the biggest number. The widespread distribution of the New York Times meant it was the ideal platform for Paul Rand’s innovative piece of communication design. In terms of modern economy, distribution platforms are a priority for enabling businesses targeting equally one or many stakeholders.

In one of the most rapidly changing sectors of the creative industries – the music industry – digitisation has given us the concept of the Long Tail. 10 years ago it became apparent that digital platforms made audio file storage and distribution cheap, and that for a digital platform selling 1M copies of a famous artist’s track was equally as lucrative as 1M artists selling a single download only. If 1M artists convinced their mothers to buy their record too, their joint sales instantly doubled to 2M. No wonder social networking recommendations became the main target for media publishers.

For the EU economy, 1M micro-companies creating enough wealth to make a decent living are equally important as one global brand generating millions in revenue. As well as creating impact by targeting just one stakeholder, individual producers can create global impact, at any scale, providing all their products are accessible via a common platform.

Different scales matter also when devising innovative solutions. It is equally as important to provide solutions for the basic level functionality (“if I press here, x will happen”), as it is for the working level (“if I streamline this service, my workflow will improve”), and high level challenges (“if we adopt a different approach, we will create a new market and benefit a new sector of society”). A Sharing Economy platform enables crowdmaking participants who may have ideas for grand societal changes, but not the tools to execute them, to join up with those good at small scale solutions, able to work from the ground up.

Innovative ideas are not there to attract private funding and create a number of temporary startup employment positions in view of “scaling fast”. Often such methods create merely a stop-gap for unemployment, but no real long-term sustainable business solution. “Fail fast and fail often” may be the motto for the “winner takes all” culture of American Capitalism, but models based on the principles of Sharing Economy allow for many small businesses to make a good living by staying small and sustainable, as well as businesses to grow organically, at the right time and for the right reasons.

Many EU regions pride themselves on small family businesses, which in modern terms create the Long Tail of the EU economy. We should not therefore encourage these to scale too rapidly and fail fast, but instead create enabling sharing technology platforms which facilitate business operations at any scale, and where even bespoke, customised one-offs can benefit from the common market place.

Real, sustainable innovation exists at the grass roots. As Dubber keeps telling me, our job is not to predict the future, but to jointly invent it.

Crowdmaking

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In recent years, crowdfunding has become popular as a way of sourcing finance that allows creative people – makers, artists, inventors and innovators – to bring a prototype or early product to market. Crowdfunding platforms enable individuals to collectively become a source of capital for fledgling commercial ventures that might not otherwise have an avenue to develop to a level of market readiness that would allow for manufacture, sales and distribution of that product.

This innovative disruption in business models is just the beginning. There is further disruption to be done – specifically in terms of how these products are developed and, more importantly, become interconnected at a time when all of the things, people, places and activities in our lives communicate with each other. This is not simply the Internet of Things, it is the Allternet – and this is where crowdmaking begins.

A product is not a standalone entity. It exists in a matrix of both digital and physical products within a context of human activity and meaning. Crowdmaking conceives of the product as a component of a far greater network of interconnected products. This means that any product can be part of a family of products, or made into something bigger by combining it with other products. In order to do this, the products must speak the same language and be supported by the platform through which they are financed and distributed.

The platform acts as an interchange. It is based on communication and protocols where things are connected and can be tracked and traced within the localised system – for instance, the home or the workplace. All of the products that plug into the platform use the same protocols. As a buyer, you can build yourself a suite of products for your home, all of which speak the same language. This becomes very powerful – not to mention useful – in smarter homes & smarter cities. If you adhere to a particular platform, that language provides consistency and interoperability.

The case of the car is instructive. If you own an Audi, you are driving a system constructed of Audi components. If you have a BMW, it will be comprised of BMW parts. The parts may be created by different manufacturers in different places, but what is important is that the components fit together to construct an integrated system, not that they are made by a single organisation. This is how the connected home will work. You source components within the system that you have adopted for your home, and these are all seamlessly interoperable because they are from the same family of parts.

The crowdmaking marketplace supports crowdmakers who use the same protocol to build any number of products, processes, tools and creative works and can interconnect as components of a wider system. It is based on an open, ‘sharing economy’ ethos. The platform provider takes (ideally) just 10% of the profit and provides the protocol, while the rest of the wealth is generated by means of the innovation and creativity of the makers. The platform is the context within which individuals and groups may create their own businesses and earn in a self-determined and flexible way.

In this way the platform enables both incumbents and new businesses to participate, whether they are one-off individual projects or mass production enterprises by large employers. All makers and manufacturers can contribute to the crowdmaker platform and have a slice of this nascent market. By boosting both small scale and large scale manufacturing, the crowdmaking platform provides a unique opportunity for the European economy while acting in the interests of the greater good and with enhanced consumer choice.

There are precedents for this kind of marketplace. Bandcamp provides a platform, environment and ecommerce system for any musician to sell their own music through a consistent framework, and takes a percentage of the revenue. Bandcamp only makes money by making money for artists. Uber provides a platform for private individuals to make money by driving passengers, and takes a share of the revenue for making this possible. The platform and interoperability is enabled by the underlying technology – and the platform makes money by creating value and income for its participants and providers.

As we begin to establish the ways in which the Allternet becomes woven into our lives, and providing we can support it with appropriate legal frameworks, there is an historic opportunity to create an entirely new kind of marketplace. It is a powerful moment for a new type of creativity and enterprise — one that uses the sharing economy as an ethical framework, and the affordances of ubiquitous crowdfunding and crowdmaking platforms to empower citizens to build, share, finance and distribute ranges of innovative products, services and content that are mutually interconnected and can, in turn, inspire further innovation.