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

本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，该方法能够从可扩展的潜在用户受众中快速生成对产品设计的反馈。许多产品创新之所以失败，是因为在设计过程中没有充分考虑用户的需求，很大程度上是因为收集用户反馈既昂贵又缓慢。该奖项将促进对利用在线众包技术的基础研究，以从外部受众对初步产品设计产生有用的、负担得起的和及时的反馈。按需产生反馈的能力将产生变革性的影响，使工程设计人员能够开发出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，增强人们对使用这些服务的信心，从而促进这一美国经济利基领域的活动。这项研究综合了几个学科的技术，包括工程设计、人机交互和计算机科学。多学科方法将有助于扩大代表不足的群体对研究的参与，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形成，并通过扩展先前研究中开发的现有平台来实现。将利用扩展平台作为在线试验台，开发软件方法，解决众包设计反馈的基本问题，例如在时间限制下无法产生反馈。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，以衡量使用综合平台对真实设计过程的影响。该平台将以开源形式发布，以造福于研究社区和社会成员，如企业家和业余爱好者，他们正在将产品创新作为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.