There is a dilemma between the traditional designer role as the arbiter and editor of user insight into the design process and the wider, more prominent crowd sourcing, co-creation type of activity.
On one hand, crowd sourcing and co creation is a fabulous way to get insight and allow people to express what they want and need. Designers have always (or should have!) started with observation to gain insight into problems, identify unmet needs and find opportunities that have not been spotted. An independent, non specialist, creative view of a problem can lead to innovation and great design solutions.
Working directly with users and asking them to specify how they would like things to work is hugely attractive to marketing teams and designers as it gives real insight into expectations and desires. But to simply build what people say they want would probably mean a very boring world, without walkman or iPods or many innovations that people said they didn't want when first shown.
The chief designer of a car company once revealed that what most people wanted in a car when asked is a toilet, but of course that isn't possible. Well why not! Great insight right there, and that's the point of collaboration and co creation.
Internal, organisational ideas are a great source of innovation too, as people have seen customer problems, or lived closely to products for years and have good ideas locked up inside them. The old staff idea box has now been replaced with sophisticated on line repositories for ideas with wiki style idea building and voting systems.
Technology has allowed the staff and customer ideas box to go global and viral and provide easy access to the creativity and innovation in everyone. Idea zones are great marketing tools for brands, they attract and inform on the concerns of their customers. And increasingly, I believe that customers, citizens, users will expect and demand that their voice is heard in the design process. This is a very rich source of creativity and also a part of overall customer experience and relationship with brands.
This is a challenge to designers, but also an opportunity. Ideas need to be developed, put into context, experience prototyped, designed and implemented. Ideas from outside can be direction setting and identify areas of interest that designers can build on and provide that other vital factor, horizon pushing. That is the weak spot of crowd sourcing of ideas. They tends to be reactive to the current, the present situation. If it is futuristic, it tends to be fanciful and fantastical. But, like the in car toilet, if we listen carefully, it might signal the future.