Big data, diminished design?

Jonathan Bean and Daniela Rosner state that crowdsourcing has played a key role in diminishing designs and the role of designers despite the growing significance of big data. They state that they find a third kind of design crowdsourcing going on when examining and looking beyond professional practice to design's modes of production. The third kind of design crowdsourcing involves the creation of design tools and their growing importance. The preferences of the crowd for complex design elements in this area are averaged and transformed into a preset that a user can apply with a single click. Aseem Agarwala, Adobe researcher, has demonstrated such a tool, which he has developed to steer novice designers toward better font selections. These approaches to crowdsourcing increase the value of design and treat it as an element of a multivariate equation to be optimized.