Customer-Made: the Site

To some extent this Web site is intended to provide a look inside a reporter's notebook. In that spirit, I'd like to direct everyone following the crowdsourcing phenomenon to this incredible resource from the cool hunters at Trendwatching.com. Called Customer-Made (and not to be confused with a recent conference by same name held in Copenhagen earlier this Spring), the site is an impressively comprehensive list of companies that have begun employing a crowdsourcing model to design, create various product lines, from cars to T-Shirts. It should be noted, there's an emphasis on product design, the sexier the better. As I didn't explore that topic in the main article I didn't draw extensively from Customer-Made in putting together the Wired article. Customer-Made did hip me to shoemaker John Fluevog's very cool Open Source Footwear program, which I mention in a sidebar in the original piece. For what it's worth, I view the emergence of crowdsourced product design as closely related to forms of so-called "user-generated content," though it's rarely categorized as such. The same conditions that are encouraging people to create their own viral videos -- namely, nominal production costs and increasingly sophisticated aesthetic sensibilities among consumers -- encourage people to design their own shoes. Those shoes are "customer made" no matter what. It's only crowdsourcing once a company takes that design, fabricates is in mass quantity and sell it. Final note: Sorry for the inexcusable lag between posts. I've been suffering through a week without Internet connectivity, to speak of. Bad timing. Hope you're still with me!