Paid crowd work offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale. But it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential,...

The crowd is emerging as a new source of innovation, and here a new way of organizing the crowd to produce new ideas is discussed: an idea generation system using combination in which participants synthesize new designs from the efforts of their peers. A crowd generates designs; then another...

Design is a process that shapes the world. At the same time, the world shapes the process of design. Over time, our image of the designer has changed. For example, product designers were often imagined as sole inventors, tinkering. Computers have, since their advent, been thought of as...

Thinking often entails interacting with cognitive tools. In many cases, notably design, the predominant tool is the page. The page allows externalizing, organizing, and reorganizing thought. Yet, the page has its own properties that by expressing thought affect it: path, proximity, place,...

A method of organizing the crowd to generate ideas is described; it integrates crowds using evolutionary algorithms; the method increases the creativity of ideas across generations, and works better than greenfield idea generation. Specifically, a design space of internet-scale idea generation...

Design is an exploratory activity, and there are many ways to get lost or stuck. There is no pre-existing map – the map is built through the design process. We first discuss design space - the space of possible choices in creating something new - and how it can be visualized. We then discuss...

Using a longitudinal in-depth field study at NASA, I investigate how the open, or peer-production, innovation model affects R&D professionals, their work, and the locus of innovation. R&D professionals are known for keeping their knowledge work within clearly defined boundaries, protecting it...