Sounds great. Democratic. Empowering. So what's the problem? For designers, it's not fun anymore. That's one reason why Douglas Bowman left Google:
Mr. Bowman’s main complaint is that in Google’s engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a Web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behavior, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner.This article brought to mind another big lesson from What Would Google Do?: sometimes the best move is just to get your brilliance out of the way of the customer. Don't over-design. Don't over-predict. That, according to author Jeff Jarvis, is the key to craigslist founder Craig Newmark's success. He barely puts any effort into consciously designing systems -- rather he sets a few basic rules, provides the tools, and lets the people roam free.
To get theological/poetic, I can see God having this debate in his head. Does he want to design a world perfectly from scratch? Or does he get something better, more interesting, more creative, and more surprising if the Universe is a platform, and evolution creates the content. In other words, does God crowdsource?
Creationists say that the design of the earth is so beautiful that it must have been designed by a single, omnipotent God. Darwinists believe that what we have is the result of a sort of massive natural crowdsourcing.
But maybe God is more like the founder of a Web 2.0 company. God, CEO of startup Earth, is inundated with great ideas from various Angel investors, each of whom has a brilliant design idea for the world. "Forget all this," says God to the Angel investors. "Let's give Adam and Eve some DNA, command them to be fruitful, multiply, submit questions and comments, call customer service with their prayers, link their knowledge to others and embed this information in new generations. We will give them the ability to have a few mutations. We'll then see what works, and what doesn't -- what gets the most evolutionary votes and what is eliminated. Eventually, after billions of years (or, in Google's case, a few beta runs and some time in Google Labs), we'll get something pretty beautiful. I'll design the basic structure, give them some really cool tools and let the human customers figure out how they want their world to be."
Along these lines, in the book Emergence, Steven Berlin Johnson relates the story of a computer programmer who wanted to beat the world record for fewest lines of code needed to organize a certain set of random numbers. It was one of those age-old problems among computer programmers. Other programmers tried to come up with the most brilliant code just by using their own minds. What Johnson's programmer did, however, was simply let a computer run millions of completely random codes and see which was best at coming up with a code that solved the age-old problem. Eventually, his random code generator, built with certain core instructions, was able to solve the problem almost as well as any human computer programmer could.
The lesson: it's not about you. Even Douglas Bowman seems to understand this -- in the article, he didn't fault Google at all. He understands that Google, like God, may have realized that the best and most beautiful designs --like craigslist or the Universe -- are emergent. They come from from the shared input of millions of users, all testing out new pathways, turning back, and then inventing something new again. Human beings, like Google's designers, all have to come to grips with the fact that we're not supposed to get it right instantly. Our choices are flawed. Our history and our lives are the result of trial and error. They are made with only the vaguest hope that a few of our decisions can play a small part in the world's long perfection.
[late update: for the spark for this idea, check this post: http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2005/11/evolution_vs_in.html]
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