The question of free or cheap is important, but not why I would not submit a design to a competition like this. (I'm not a "designer," so what follows are simpl

The question of free or cheap is important, but not why I would not submit a design to a competition like this. (I'm not a "designer," so what follows are simply general remarks about my personal experience with things like this.) Software design of all types, including UX, is an attempt to solve a problem given a set of constraints. There are thus three things involved: 1) solving, 2) the problem, and 3) the constraints. Crowdsourcing solutions emphasizes the solving part while glossing over the problem and the constraints. Even if the "client" (in this case Skype) articulates the problem and the constraints clearly, why do we assume they are doing a good job of understanding what they want? As Einstein put it, we cannot solve a problem using the thinking that got us into it in the first place. A big part of "creativity" is being able to redefine the problem or to play with the constraints in a novel way. This is not going to happen simply by submitting a solution to a different problem and expecting the client to say, "Aha! We were trying to solve the wrong problem!!" Humans being humans, you need to go through a process of discovery together and see if you can come up with new ways to reframe the existing problem. This cannot be done in a dictatorial fashion by the "client," nor can it be done in a dictatorial fashion by the designer, it must be done collaboratively. Imagine Skype asked for keyboard bindings to make managing multiple chats easier. How would you go about submitting a design that used Kinect to implement a 3D gestural interface so that users could manage multiple conversations in 3D space using a different part of their brain to keep track of who is having each conversation? This might not be a good idea, but if it was a good idea, you can't get there through a design competition, you get there through interviewing the Skype stakeholders and investigating what problem they're really trying to solve. So coming back to this design competition, if I were a designer I would pass. Not because I'd be giving away my work for free, but because I wouldn't be able to do my best work, which consistes of investigating all the problem and the constraints before trying to solve the problem. NOTE: This has nothing to do with free vs. expensive. A handsomely paid gig to design the best solution to the wrong problem is not interesting to me. I would trot out this exact same reasoning to a client that came to me with a "spec" or set of "requirements" and who offered to start paying me immediately to code a solution.