CrowdSight: A Crowdsourcing Platform for Catalyzing and Studying User-Centered Innovation in Engineering Design

该研究项目的目标是开发一种新的计算设计方法的理论和实现，该方法能够快速生成潜在用户的可扩展受众对产品设计的反馈。许多产品创新的失败是因为在设计过程中没有充分考虑用户的需求，这在很大程度上是因为收集用户反馈的成本高，速度慢。该奖项将使基础研究的技术，利用在线众包产生有用的，负担得起的，及时的反馈初步产品设计从外部观众。按需生成反馈的能力将产生变革性的影响，使工程设计师能够开发更好地满足不同用户需求的产品创新。这项研究的结果还可以改善商业反馈服务，提高人们对使用这些服务的信心，从而促进美国经济中这一利基市场的活动。这项研究综合了工程设计、人机交互和计算机科学等多个学科的技术。多学科方法将有助于扩大代表性不足的群体在研究中的参与，并对工程教育产生积极影响。设计方法将通过研究产品设计评论的话语来塑造，并通过扩展现有的平台来实现。将使用扩展平台作为在线测试平台，开发软件方法，解决众包设计反馈的基本问题，例如无法在时间限制下生成反馈。研究结果将大大提高众包设计反馈的质量、可预测性和可负担性，并将推广到其他领域。还将进行实验，以衡量使用集成平台对真实设计过程的影响。该平台将作为开源发布，以造福研究社区和社会成员，如企业家和业余爱好者，他们追求产品创新作为其个人或职业目标的一部分。

The objective of this research project is to develop the theory and implementation of a novel computational design method that enables rapid generation of feedback on product designs from a scalable audience of potential users. Many product innovations fail because the needs of users were not adequately considered during the design process, in large part because gathering user feedback is expensive and slow. This award will enable fundamental research on techniques that leverage online crowdsourcing for generating helpful, affordable, and timely feedback on preliminary product designs from an external audience. The ability to generate feedback on-demand will have a transformative impact by enabling engineering designers to develop product innovations that better satisfy the needs of heterogeneous users. The results from this research can also lead to improvements in commercial feedback services and increased confidence in the use of these services, thereby promoting activity in this niche of the U.S. economy. This research synthesizes techniques from several disciplines including engineering design, human-computer interaction, and computer science. The multi-disciplinary approach will help broaden participation of under-represented groups in research and positively impact engineering education. The design method will be shaped by studying the discourse of product design reviews and implemented by extending an existing platform developed in prior research. Using the extended platform as an online testbed, software methods will be developed that address fundamental problems for crowdsourcing design feedback such as the inability to generate feedback under time constraints. The results will considerably improve the quality, predictability, and affordability of crowdsourced design feedback and will generalize to other domains. Experiments will also be conducted to measure the impact of using the integrated platform on authentic design processes. The platform will be released as open source to benefit the research community and members of society such as entrepreneurs and amateurs who are pursuing product innovations as part of their personal or professional goals.