To answer what is good design is quite tough and has been debated upon quite a bit on the YD Facebook page. While some feel a good design creates desire to possess (regardless of need), others feel that a good design caters to what people want. The Crowdsourcing Headphone Project reflects to the latter, but the twist is that the designers did not conceptualize the headphones. They merely refined the feedback of some 1500 people, who responded to their request for crowd sourcing!
These headphones were not designed by a classic team of designers. They were designed by an independent crowd that followed the call for submitting their ideas for their ideal pair of headphones. With a unique process model, the crowdsourcing team from Creative DNA Austria (Martin Zopf, Rudolf Stefanich and Stefan Kachaunov) wanted to test if crowdsourcing can lead to high quality results in the field of design. On a simple web platform the ideas were collected, ranked and discussed. The strongest trends were analyzed and put together to form a design manifesto which lead to the final design. The final outcome is a functioning pair of Bluetooth wireless headphones, a gentle mixture of nature and electronics. At the end, the concept proved it’s resourcefulness – despite it’s unusual workflow, crowdsourcing is a tool that will enter the world of creative collaboration for good.
Designers: Stefan Kachaunov, Rudolf Stefanich & Martin Zopf
