CHS: Small: Exploring Design and Evaluation Space through Crowds and Communities

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Design leads to new products that drive economic growth; new technologies make it possible for many more people to be involved in design processes. For example, some online community members now share designs for products with each other, allowing each member to further develop an idea and customize it for their own needs. These design choices and explorations could, in principle, be combined to give a wider picture of the space of possible designs around a given problem; this, in turn, might lead to better overall designs and solutions. Further, collective exploration of large design spaces might afford solutions to problems that are currently difficult or impossible to solve. This project seeks to understand how large numbers of cooperating individuals can create new products through better understanding and guiding their exploration of possible designs. The goal of the work is to discover tools and techniques that can be used to increase the speed and quality of design for both physical products, such as those produced by 3D printers, and informational products, such as articles in Wikipedia. This project seeks to improve design as practiced by large sets of cooperating individuals. This improvement will be measured by looking at both the quality of the designs produced, as well as the overall coverage of alternatives and the efficiency of the exploratory process. The research will proceed over a three-year period. The first year will seek to understand how descriptions of design are related to design processes and outcomes. This will be accomplished through five activities. The first activities will look at existing data from two different domains: designs of 3D objects, and texts of articles. The next two studies will involve experiments with human designers who will be presented with alternative descriptions for the same objects, as well the same descriptions for alternative objects. The last activity of the first year is related to broadening participation in computing: exercises will be constructed to attract participation from high school students. The second year will study how changes in design criteria can guide the exploration of design spaces. Human participants will be placed in one of two conditions that address changes in criteria in different ways. The third year will use experiments to discover how tools that work over longer periods of time can augment the productivity of designers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.