Crowd Design: From Tools for Empowerment to Platform Capitalism

Florian Alexander Schmidt

ISBN 10: 303561198X / ISBN 13: 9783035611984

Published by Birkhäuser, 2017

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 9783035611984

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Crowd Design: From Tools for Empowerment to Platform Capitalism
• Publisher: Birkhäuser
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 303561198X
• ISBN 13: 9783035611984
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The digital revolution is interwoven with the promise to empower the user. Yet, the rise of centralised, commercial platforms for crowdsourced work questions the validity of this narrative. In Crowd-Design, Florian Alexander Schmidt analyses the workings and the rhetoric of crowdsourced work platforms by comparing the way they address the masses today with historic notions of the crowd. The utopian concepts of early online collaboration are taken as a vantage point from which to view and critique current and, at times, dystopian applications of crowdsourced work. The study is focused on the crowdsourcing of design tasks, but these specific applications are used to examine the design of the more general mechanisms employed by the platform providers to motivate and control the crowds.

Crowd-Design is as much about the crowdsourcing of design as it is about the design of crowdsourcing.

About the Authors

Florian Alexander Schmidt, Professor for Conceptual Design and Media Theory at University of Applied Sciences HTW Dresden

Florian Alexander Schmidt, Professor für Designkonzeption und Medientheorie, Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft HTW Dresden