Crowdsourcing in design research - Potentials & limitations
Year: 2013
Editor: Udo Lindemann, Srinivasan V, Yong Se Kim, Sang Won Lee, John Clarkson, Gaetano Cascini
Author: Petersen, Soren Ingomar
Series: ICED
Institution: ingomar&ingomar - consulting, United States of America
Page(s): 149-158
ISBN: 978-1-904670-44-5
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
Crowdsourcing has by now proven itself particularly useful in the early phases of product design, outperforming traditional in-house R&D. However, little attention has been given to the application of crowdsourcing in design research where the cost and time of planning and executing studies, combined with inherent biases in selection of participants, unintentional priming of and inadvertent influence of subjects responses can ruin the outcome. Additionally, when unexpected and unexplainable findings occur, the value and validity of the study can be seriously undermined. Here lean, quick crowdsourcing experiments could aid in planning of conventional research or in some cases replacing these completely. We propose a Six Step Co-creation Cycle method and apply it to thirty projects with varying level of innovativeness. In doing so we uncover a range of pros, such as uncovering biases, collecting new knowledge and building a research network and cons, such as limited ability to synthesize ideas and the need to eliminating noise, of applying crowdsourcing in the early phases of design research.
Keywords: Crowdsourcing, social networks, new social media, Six Step Co-creation Cycle, wisdom of crowds, design research