Aug 27, 2015
Hurry! Great Home Building Opportunity!
Or, the ignorance behind speculative design contests and the dangers they represent
Attention, home builders! A new contest has just been launched with the opportunity to build a beautiful new home for a designer with a substantial following on social media! The contest holder has even guaranteed to not only choose a winning home, but even pay the builder at the end of the seven-day entry period!
Don’t miss this chance at a ton of exposure on a major designer’s Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Check the home brief below and get building!
HOME BRIEF
Hey, you home-building ninjas! I hope you’re as excited about this as I am.
I want to keep this home brief exactly that — brief, because I really just want you all to let your creativity run wild! You guys are the experts at this, so maybe just try a few different ideas, even?
I really love the elegance and message that this home above portrays to everyone that sees it. Very professional looking, and doesn’t just look like any of the standard homes that someone else could easily have, too. Very bespoke and even artisanal, you might say. I’m all about honoring craftsmanship.
I also like the minimalist nature of this cabin. Very warm and approachable. I want my home to have this same kind of friendly, welcoming vibe to it.
So really, somewhere in between those two would just be perfect.
As far as other building direction goes, I don’t know, I’m definitely a fan of the color blue.
I’ll need rooms, for sure, and probably some windows. Go nuts!
CONTEST SPECIFICATIONS
Timeframe:
7 days
Deliverables:
1 fully built home (and a matching mailbox, if you get in the zone and have extra time)
Reward:
Contest holder is willing to pay upward of $6,000 to one winning home builder! He’s also agreed to promote your building company on social media and his blog, and even put some stickers in the windows of his new home!
And don’t forget, you can submit as many fully built homes as you like. The more homes you enter into the contest, the better chance you have of being noticed by the contest holder!
Wait…what?
…is what I hope you’re saying to yourself right now
THE REALITY
Seems like a strange, nonsensical proposition, right? Obviously, no home builder in its right mind would ever agree to speculatively build a home (let alone homes), just to be considered for a chance to be paid even the full market value of its final product. And an offer of $6,000 is something you’d only expect to come from a toddler being asked, “What does a house cost?” and then blurting out the largest number they can think of.
Sadly, this is essentially a direct metaphor concocted from a real email I received from a logo design contest site today. You basically just sub in “logo design” for “home”, adjust the reward offer proportionally*, and you have a real life opportunity that was presented to probably tens of thousands of people, just today.
*I used $6,000 above because it would be 3% of a $200,000 home; the real fee being offered for professional logo design in my inbox today was about 3% of my average logo project fee.
There is no reason that this brand of bullshit should be seen as any less despicable in a design arena than in the housing or food service industries. This analogy’s been used a few times before, I believe, but you certainly wouldn’t ask a chef to prepare you several different items from the menu, and suggest for a fucking second that “you guarantee to pay for the one you liked the most”. You’d get laughed out of the restaurant.
There will be some that will say, “Well, those industries are dealing with a lot of raw material costs that make their situations a little different.”
To them, I ask, “Why are you trying so hard to align yourself on the wrong side of history?”
Sure, they’re different. Everything’s different. But you aren’t just paying for raw materials when you buy a house, unless of course, you’re building it yourself from scratch. When you go out to eat, and you splurge a little extra change for the “big steak”, that’s not what that slice of beef and that potato cost. If you’re expecting to pay that, then you’re probably grocery shopping.
There’s time, and skill, and creativity going into making those things for you. And anyone who honestly thinks that time, skill (a bi-product of time), and creativity aren’t raw materials with real monetary value, you can just continue buying $5-$100 logos for all I’m concerned.
And we’ll just continue to not think about you at all.
If you feel like you’re in a camp that might very well submit to contests like these, or — even worse — hold a contest like these, you should really click on those big green buttons above for some helpful tips.
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Have questions about the thoughts expressed here or thoughts of your own that can’t be addressed in a comment? Have a suggestion for a topic or artist/designer to feature on Handling the Curve? Feel free to email Ryan Hamrick at H@mrick.me any time, and chat. Follow Handling the Curve for more thoughts on design, creativity, and life as it pertains to them.
