In a recent post to his Technium blog, Kevin Kelly, with his usual eloquence, reminds us that, “now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well” (emphasis his). The key reason for this, Kelly goes on to say, is time. Pure ‘bottom up’ does not operate on a time scale requisite with our ‘instant culture’. In his words:
We are too much in a hurry to wait around for a pure hive mind. Our best technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every successful technological system, including Wikipedia, has design wired into it.
What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much “hive” in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness.
It strikes me that this combination of design and hive-ness is precisely what enables a process such as a DesignShop to facilitate the conception and emergence of ideas from within a community of participants (i.e., the ‘bottom’) and then develop them into definable, actionable solutions over the course of just a few days.
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