Massively Collaborative Creativity

Now more than ever, Inspiration is all around us. The brains of the world are ours for the picking.

The advent of instant worldwide reach for creative expression as ushered in by sites like YouTube and Blogger has created a kind of creative farm on the internet. Any idea appearing online can instantly become a seed for creative expression for millions of people. While any idea in the universe has the potential to grow into anything over time, the soil of the internet is so fertile that whole forests of human creation spring up overnight.

The virtual collective consciousness is providing such a bounty of creative output that inspiration for design is nearly limitless. With so many people creating content that can be seen by millions, designers (Especially interactive designers) are surrounded by inspiration in our daily work.

Nearly all of the art that is borne of online collaboration is purely experimentation and exercise, and as a result it is usually very raw. This is an effect of the general disarray that is inherent in a system as rapidly evolving as the world wide web. Part of our jobs as designers is to hone and focus raw creativity into something useful and meaningful.

This collective creativity raises new issues of ownership and copyright. When a TV ad featuring LOLcats runs nationally will someone try to sue? Where is the line between “inspired by” and “stolen from”? Is the line more blurry in the virtual world than in the physical world?