CAREER: Advancing Collective Innovation

社会上最棘手的问题需要新的策略，让不同的利益相关者参与到设计过程中，以解决更大、更棘手的问题。虽然互联网使人们更容易找到和协调人员，但我们需要推进“集体创新”的基础知识和技术，即群体共同探索和完善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组成子问题，积极地让广泛的利益相关者和潜在用户参与进来，并协调具有解决更大难题所需的不同知识的人们。这个项目将创建交互式计算机系统来支持这些过程。拟议的研究有可能从根本上改善人们共同解决具有挑战性的问题的方式，从小规模的用户界面到更大、更混乱的社会规模的挑战，并增加从事创新的人数，这对实现国家目标很重要。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，以构建合适的研究问题；2)如何有效地选择和建立最有前途和最有创意的想法；3)如何通过收集现有社区的反馈或通过众包和社交媒体收集反馈，有效地参与大规模的参与式设计。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慧理论的基础上（并在两者之间建立明确的联系）。开发的系统将在真实的、外部有效的环境中进行评估，以确定这些过程集成时出现的真实世界模式。最终的实验工具将作为开源发布，以便其他研究人员可以在项目进展的基础上进行构建。该项目还包括重要的教育目标：培养社会计算系统设计、设计思维和评估方法方面的学生研究人员；开设研究生集体创新新课程并扩大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.