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

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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.