The project is set in the context of open innovation communities in which people design physical products that may be based in part on previously contributed designs, exploring how creativity could be enhanced in these communities by presenting the right related designs to an inventor at the right time in order to inspire a creative remixing. 3D printing online communities allow makers, designers characterized as expert amateurs, to share, modify, combine, and print each other's designs. These communities present an opportunity to understand and improve collective design, a form of cumulative innovation. Improvements to innovative processes will contribute to the growth of the economy, and design is an activity that is educationally appealing to many different age groups, demographics, and academic interests.
This research will analyze an existing open innovation community. From data gathered, tools will be built that suggest designs that when combined are more likely to result in an impactful invention. These tools will consider a wide range of possible innovations, suggesting areas of the design space that may lead to fruitful discoveries. Because collective design depends on the varied expertise of its participants, the project brings together makers with professional engineers, architects, and fabricators through an innovation contest. The makers bring energy, diversity, and experience with online collaborative design processes. The professionals bring detailed knowledge of practical problems, as well as an understanding of modeling and simulation technology in relation to materials used in additive manufacturing. The primary method is experimental, informed by the analysis of existing online communities, and testing the new creativity support tools that will be developed. The envisioned tools will analyze the products and social networks of remix communities in order to suggest candidate designs for modification or recombination. Long-held theories about innovation processes will be tested in a new context, potentially leading to new insights concerning collective innovation that will be instantiated in new tools and systems. Data will be gathered, a system will be built, experiments will be run, a contest will be hosted, and the accumulated learning, data, and software will be made available to other interested researchers.
