CrowdConcept : assessing the crowd's creative capacity

Abstract

Crowdsourcing creative work - the process of outsourcing a creative task to a large online community or crowd - has grown in popularity over the last decade and is now considered a serious design strategy. However, there has been little research examining how the composition of the crowd and the nature of the crowd's interactions affect the crowd's creative capacity. Building upon related findings in the group creativity literature, this thesis examines the effects social diversity, cognitive diversity, and communication capability on the crowd's ability to generate high quality design concepts. A design challenge to "reimagine the public restroom experience" was developed, and challenge participants were placed into crowds with varying levels of diversity and communication capability. Findings from the study show that social diversity and cognitive diversity had positive effects on the quality of participants' concepts. Furthermore, diverse, communication-capable crowds generated higher quality concepts than participants in crowds with no communication capability, but low diversity, communication-capable crowds performed worse than crowds with no communication capability. These findings suggest that designers of CCW platforms should consider the diversity of the crowd when deciding how much communication capability to build into crowdsourcing platforms. Future work is needed to investigate the generalizability of these findings for different problem types.