Dan Winship on design by committee

Today Dan Winship wrote a wonderful mail about the perils of designing software by community process.

One of his footnotes is a link to a set of paintings designed by committtee; residents of various countries were polled using professional market research techniques to discover what characteristics they would most like to see in an ideal painting (ballerinas, the seaside, water, refrigerator-sized) and then the paintings were created, without any regard for coherence. The results are wonderfully bad.