CAREER: Advancing Collective Innovation

社会上最令人望而生畏的问题需要新的战略，让许多不同的利益相关者参与到设计过程中，以解决更大、更复杂的问题。虽然互联网使寻找和协调人们变得很容易，但我们需要推进基础知识和技术，以实现“集体创新”，即团队集体探索和改进大问题空间的解决方案。集体创新的工作原理是将问题分解为许多构成的子问题，积极参与广泛的利益相关者和潜在用户群体，并协调人们使用解决更大谜题的每一块拼图所需的不同知识。该项目将创建交互式计算机系统来支持这些进程。拟议中的研究有可能从根本上改善人们集体工作的方式，以解决具有挑战性的问题，从小规模的用户界面到更大、更混乱的社会规模的挑战，并增加参与创新的人数，这对实现国家目标至关重要。更具体地说，该项目将提供新颖的互动系统，以探索推进集体创新的三个关键挑战：1)如何综合大量先前的研究和实例，以便构建适当的研究问题；2)如何有效地选择和建立最有前途和创造性的想法；以及3)如何通过从现有社区收集反馈或通过众包和社交媒体获取反馈，有效地参与大规模参与性设计。为了指导和激励这些系统的设计，本研究建立在设计思维和集体智力的理论基础上(并在这些理论之间建立了明确的联系)。开发的系统将在真实的、外部有效的环境中进行评估，以确定当这些过程整合时出现的现实世界模式。由此产生的实验工具将以开放源代码的形式发布，以便其他研究人员可以在该项目的进展基础上再接再厉。该项目还包括重要的教育目标：培训社会计算系统设计、设计思维和评估方法方面的学生研究人员；创建一门关于集体创新的新研究生课程；以及扩大PI目前的设计工作室课程。

Society's most daunting problems call for new strategies that engage many diverse stakeholders into the design process in order to solve bigger and messier problems. While the Internet makes it easy to find and coordinate people, we need to advance fundamental knowledge and technologies for "collective innovation", where groups collectively explore and refine solutions for big problem spaces. Collective innovation works by breaking problems down into many constituent sub-problems, actively engaging a broad group of stakeholders and potential users, and coordinating people with the disparate knowledge needed to solve each piece of a bigger puzzle. This project will create interactive computer systems to support these processes. The proposed research has the potential to fundamentally improve the way people work collectively to solve challenging problems, from small-scale user interfaces to bigger and messier society-scale challenges and to increase the number of people engaged in innovation, important to achieving national objectives. More specifically, this project will contribute novel interactive systems to explore three key challenges for advancing collective innovation: 1) how to synthesize large collections of prior research and examples in order to frame appropriate research questions, 2) how to productively select and build on the most promising and creative ideas, and 3) how to effectively engage in large-scale participatory design by gathering feedback from an existing community or harvesting it through crowdsourcing and social media. To guide and motivate the design of these systems, this research builds on (and draws explicit links between) theories of design thinking and collective intelligence. The systems developed will be evaluated in authentic, externally valid settings to identify the real-world patterns that emerge when these processes are integrated. The resulting experimental tools will be released as open source so that other researchers may build on the project's progress. The project also includes significant educational goals: training student researchers in social computing system design, design thinking, and evaluation methods; creating a new graduate course on collective innovation; and scaling up the PI's current design studio course.