The Internet makes possible a different kind of design, based on a new phenomenon: crowdsourcing creativity, where many individuals perform small design tasks for fun, nominal compensation, or both. What if the iterative application of a crowd's energy is used to generate, combine and refine ideas and possible solutions to social and technical problems? If the sequential application of crowdsourcing to idea generation works well, then many difficult design challenges might be addressed. If crowdsourcing has limits, then finding these limits will provide a more focused path for the growth of peer production. During the course of this project, participants, drawn from the general public, will generate initial ideas, then combine the many different ideas of their peers, seeking to solve difficult and open-ended design problem through a large scale process of combination, evaluation, selection, and combination again, cycling through these steps until a solution is converged upon.
The Intellectual Merit of this research lies in the design and results of experiments that study crowdsourcing in the idea discovery process. The Broader Impact of this research lies in its potential harnessing of human intellectual power to attack challenging problems whose solution will affect every one of us. The project is potentially transformative, in that the crowdsourcing of important problems might accelerate by orders of magnitude our progress on pressing social and technological issues.
