At BrandHook, we’re continually listening to the real people – just this week we’ve spoken about shampoo, wine, bras and much more.  We do a lot of this listening with the people, rummaging through their houses, drinking wine with them or via The Grapevine, our online community platform.

The Grapevine was built around a number of needs but saw the power of crowd sourcing and wanted to go one step further – actually understand the crowd.

We do love crowdsourcing and stumbled across this quite brilliant community consultation example in our home town of Melbourne.

As part of the Flinders Street Design Competition, 6 designs have been shortlisted and the people have been asked to vote via a People’s Choice Award.  And whereas crowd sourcing often forgets the basic principles of research (asking the right questions), criteria is based on 4 criteria including design merit, transport function, cultural heritage and urban design.

Check out the website and Melbournians, do vote for your favourite.

http://vote.majorprojects.vic.gov.au

We so often here that customers don’t get a chance to have their say – so here is a perfect and innovative means to do so.

As an aside, there is the myth that when Mumbai (then Bombay) and the current  Flinders Street Station designs were made in the UK, they were shipped at the same time and labeled incorrectly – meaning Melbourne got the Mumbai design and vice versa.  Will make you look at Flinders Street slightly differently the next time you’re waiting for the train.