Harvest more online with Electric Farm

Trust me, this is the stuff of a designer's dreams.

Mick Jagger's letter to Andy Warhol asking him to create the cover for a Rolling Stones album is clearly the greatest brief from a client to a designer ever.

To be honest, the fact that it includes the phrases 'I leave it in your capable hands to do what ever you want' and 'please write back saying how much money you would like' means the whole thing is pretty much sewn up, but that it also recommends taking as long as is necessary is clearly the clincher.

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In a land far away, I would run as fast as an Indian tracker through the summer woods, marbles ticking in my pocket and catapult ready for the Alderbrook tribe who ruled beyond the stream.

A threepenny bit would deliver more sherbert dips than was healthy and wide eyed excitement was when our cap-wearing postie delivered the Eagle, neatly rolled in brown paper and sent by Nan. In those pages, between the strip cartoons and exploded diagrams of jet liners were the junk ads featuring muscle bound sand kickers and mischievous hand shake buzzers. I recall staring in wonder at the huge sea monsters that could be mine to grow from a packet of eggs... all I had to do was send a postal order. But my Mum said no, no, no and my pocket money was saved for another airfix kit.

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The value of labour seems to be at something of a crossroads.

The earth's population grows by a quarter of a million people a day, ensuring that there are ever more people ready and able to work. By contrast the fragile state of the global economy means that fewer jobs are available, while higher standards of living are proving more expensive to maintain around the world.

As factories across Southeast Asia struggle with production, and workers demand better conditions and rates of pay it feels as if the era of cheap labour is coming to end. Simultaneously Chinese businesses are building factories in Africa, looking to utilise the next great untapped workforce.

The internet has opened up the international labour market and facilitated outsourcing in ways no-one could have imagined. Amazon's Mechanical Turk connects buyers and sellers of work and enables transactions from as little as $0.01 for the most minor of tasks. There's questionable value in this sort of exchange from both parties point of view: the buyer must question the quality of the work being supplied at such a low rate, regardless of global variations in the worth of currency; likewise the seller must recognise that in order to make any sort of living from the service that the volume of work will preclude any kind of attention to detail or worth.

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