I believe there’s a saying about a camel being a horse designed by committee. If you want proof of that (and reassurance that data will never replace human beings in the creative process), then you need look no further than The House of Clicks.
‘The House of Clicks’ is Sweden’s collective dream home. It was created by analysing 86,000 listings and over 200 million clicks on the countries premier househunting site Hemnet. It’s what’s known as ‘big data’, and what big data created (to my eye at least) looks like a storage container with some windows. See what you think:
This shows pretty conclusively that you can’t find out what people want (They don’t really want this do they?) by simply averaging out what they individually ask for. You can’t please everyone with a single product and ‘The House of Clicks’ is surely worthwhile if it reminds us of nothing more than that.