A while back, I made a post about crowdsourcing, an internet buzzword that identifies the productive path of online networking. Recently, I stumbled upon CrowdSpring, a site set up to align creatives with clients. It is providing a great entry for any designer or client that wants to get involved with a creative endeavor.
The price of rice is rising, and this is bad news for near half of the world’s population who depend on it for their daily fill. Earlier this year, a wave of pests and disease swept across Vietnam’s rice fields, decimating crops and causing several rice producing countries to limit their export in order to secure their domestic stock. The world seems to teetering on the brink of a global food crisis, in times where population explosion demands more than ever from the agricultural industrial machine.
And an industry it is. In the 1960’s, the US-funded “Green Revolution” brought monocultural practices to Asia and Latin America, introducing farming practices that focus on a few, chemical fertilizer-reliant crops, optimized for yield, not nutritional value or suitability to local conditions. Monoculture production promised to do for food production what the Model T had done for auto production, and at first glance it worked, the soil boosted by oil-based fertilizer.
Read more…
A long time ago bottom up development was the only type. People who were using the objects were the ones that were making the improvements on them. This type of development not only prevents alterations of an idea for selfish reasons, but also creates a community around the object itself. The Danish windmill is one of the last, large scale examples of this. Somehow, development of ideas, tools, and products were taken from the open hands of the people and forced into an enclosed room, where the ‘experts’ improve them, then throw them over the wall to the people who pay whatever they are told is the proper price.
Today, I read an article about crowdsourcing. Online collaborative efforts have existed for quite some time and the entire web 2.0 concept exists because of user generated content, but the marriage of the two can have some really interesting repercussions. For example, WEbook is a project that invites online collaborators to come post written material on their site with the hopes of getting published. Users of the site can then vote on the writings and the highest ranked writings will be published in a book. Local Motors uses crowdsourcing to develop cars.
Just over a year ago i first saw this video of Johnny Lee creating a multi-touch (touchless) interface using a Wii remote. Though I thought that the idea was neat and that Johnny was a genius, I kind of wrote it off as a follower of the muti-touch trend. A few months later I saw this video. This time Johnny is creating a fairly stunning head tracking interface, again using the Wii remote and a few parts. Once more I was thoroughly impressed with Mr. Lee’s innovation, but I still wasn’t really catching the “why” other than making some cool things happen with a Wiimote and a PC…until I saw his TED talk.
Johnny Lee is setting a new standard for hi-tech research, and he is doing so by making it available to everyone. Using a camcorder and YouTube, he is teaching the world how to create devices that are at the frontline of innovation. This can empower users of technology and fosters much stronger development of products. Rather than developing in a box, he is trying to make everyone a part of the process.