I Kickstarted Your Project And I Didn’t Even Get The Lousy T-Shirt

Crowdsourcing is a hot not-so-new trend that’s been heralded as a solution for funding creative works of all kinds, from films to games to manufactured products. Popular sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are also venture-funded startups that facilitate distributed contribution to ideas, providing the appearance of investment or pre-orders. But even as more and more individuals source and fund projects through sites like Kickstarter, few realize that the satisfaction (or disappointment) they take away from the process has more to do with the experience of kickstarting, rather than from the product itself. As crowdfunding becomes its own form of entertainment irrespective of whether or not projects succeed or fail, the projects created risk becoming empty shells, lies that can never produce the results they promise because their existence was never meant to produce them in the first place. This talk offers a philosophy of crowdfunding as entertainment, and then presents a new project in development at Georgia Tech as a part of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing that tries to apply some of these lessons from popular personal electronics projects, including Kickstarted products like Twine, and related projects like Arduino and Raspberry Pi.