Crowdsourcing Design

June 2, 2014
Lixiu (Lisa) Yu | Carnegie Mellon University

The advent of the web has made it possible to combine many people’s cognition, creating exciting new opportunities for collective design. However, tapping the crowd’s creative potential faces many challenges; for example, crowds are difficult to coordinate, and most crowd members lack design experience.

In this talk, I will present my efforts to understand and promote collective design through crowdsourcing. I will first present a project that allows crowd members to build on each other’s work through an evolutionary process inspired by generic algorithms. I will then describe my newest work, which aims to convert online design examples into useful input to help crowd generate new ideas. This work explores how we can use analogical design examples to help crowds generate better ideas, and how to distribute analogy-based design across multiple crowds. Through these two projects, I will suggest ways to promote collective design: 1) creating technology-augmented distributed design structures, and 2) mining existing designs.

Speaker Details

Lixiu (Lisa) Yu is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Human Computer Interaction Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D. in Management of Information Systems from Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research interests include crowdsourcing, social computing, design, and creativity. Her research has been featured in New Scientist, ACM TechNews, and Wired Magazine.