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The history of the human race is one of increasing intellectual capability. Since the time of our early ancestors, our brains have gotten no bigger; nevertheless, there has been a steady accretion of new tools for intellectual work and an increasing distribution of complex activities among many minds. An important next challenge is to support not only productivity but creativity and innovation [National-Research-Council, 2003] and to do so not only at the individual but at the social level.
Over the last few years, researchers from various scientific disciplines [Benkler, 2006; Bereiter, 2002; Florida, 2002; Tapscott & Williams, 2006] have argued that we are in the midst of a technological, economic, and organizational perturbation, innovation, and transformation that allows us to rethink, renegotiate, and redefine learning, working, and collaboration and to create a new understanding and new support environments for creativity and design. One of the fundamental changes taking place is the democratization of design [O'Reilly, 2006; Raymond & Young, 2001; von Hippel, 2005]. The industrial information society specialized in producing finished goods (like movies, music, software systems, and learning environments) to be specified fully at design time and consumed passively at use time. The emerging networked information society [Benkler, 2006] is focusing on the demands of active contributors [Fischer, 2002] for evolvable environments (including platforms, seeds, and tools) that allow the “owners of problems” to create solutions by and for themselves — thereby democratizing design to unleash social creativity. Our proposed research project will explore conceptual frameworks, develop systems, study and support practices, and engage in assessments to exploit the strengths and avoid the pitfalls associated with social production and mass collaboration in the networked information society.
Problem Description and Unique Opportunity
Democratizing Design and Creativity
Creativity and innovation are being democratized [von Hippel, 2005]: users of product and services are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. This ability to innovate is improving as a result of the increased quality and availability of computer software and hardware and access to a greater variety of powerful tools and components in support of creativity. Democratizing design is necessary because the needs of users for products are highly heterogeneous in many fields and can therefore not be anticipated by designers and expertise and talent is widely distributed [Anderson, 2004]. While the existence and availability of tools are necessary, they are not sufficient to support social creativity and democratizing design. Access to these environments is a first step but we need to create socio-technical environments [Mumford, 2000; Trist, 1981] that allow people to acquire the knowledge how to use them and adapt them to their needs.
There is overwhelming evidence for the importance of democratizing design and creativity—from a large number of arguments, we provide a few for illustration:
• “We have only scratched the surface of what would be possible if end users could freely program their own applications. As has been shown time and again, no matter how much designers and programmers try to anticipate and provide for what users will need, the effort always falls short because it is impossible to know in advance what may be needed. End users should have the ability to create customizations, extensions, and applications. [Nardi, 1993]
• “The hacker culture and its successes pose by example some fundamental questions about human motivation, the organization of work, the future of professionalism, and the shape of the firm.” [Raymond & Young, 2001]
• “Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents.” [von Hippel, 2005]
• "We know we don't have a corner on creativity. There are creative people all around the world, hundreds of millions of them, and they are going to think of things to do with our basic platform that we didn't think of. " Vint Cerf (http://www.computerworld.com/, Nov 25, 2005).
Contrasting and Exploring the Potential of Three Models for Social Creativity and Democratizing Design
The following three models provide a global conceptualization for framing our proposed research.
Model-1: Professionally-Created Design. This model (see Figure 1) has been the dominant model used in the industrialized information economy (including: publications, instructionist approaches to learning, and most uses in the Web 1.0 area). Information and designs are developed by professional designers and are broadcast to passive users. While there may be some socially creative collaborations between the professional developers, this model has severe limitations to support social creativity and democratizing design among all participants: the users are consumers, they have no opportunities to contribute, there are no user-driven improvements and innovations and the coverage is limited in diversity and scope (the “Long Tail” contributions are not incorporated [Anderson, 2004]). This does not mean that this model should be abandoned: it may serve well for example in safety-critical applications.

Figure 1: Model-1 — Professionally-Created Design
Model-2: Professionally-Created Designs based on User Requests. This model allows users to take a more active role: some of them will send requests and documentation for a design to be included to the professionals (e.g.: to the designers at Google or the Wiki developers for inclusion of a user object, an idea, or a bug report) and the professionals will make the contribution. The major advantage of this model is that the active users do not need to know or learn the formalism (e.g.: SketchUp or a Wiki-language) required to make a contribution. The major disadvantages of this model are: (1) it deprives the owners of the problems of some autonomy and make them dependent on the professionals; (2) ill-defined problems can not be delegated (i.e.: problem finding and framing is not supported); and (3) the cycles for incrementally refining and evolving designs is less effective because the back-talk [Schön, 1983] of a partially completed design goes to the professional developers and not to the owner of the problems.

Figure 2: Model-2 — Professionally-Created Designs based on User Requests
Model-3: Democratizing Design: Making all Voices Heard. In this model the developers are not developed a complete system, but a seed providing opportunities for all users to become active contributors. The seed is equally relevant for creating content, for providing a platform for user-generated contributions, and mechanism (learning opportunities, reward structures, social network support) supporting the social community needed to make this model viable. The proposed research will be focused on addressing the challenges associated with this model, making it a reality, and assessing its strengths, weaknesses, and broad implications new models of creativity, for creativity support tools, and for educational implications. One of the challenges is that users need to know or learn the platform required for making contributions and that they will take the time and effort required to make contributions. Some of our basic assumptions are: in case users overcome these hurdles they will gain control, autonomy, and freedom to become active participants, new creative processes will be supported, and the creative outcomes will be improved because the contributions (including the problem framing) can incrementally be refined and evolved. The figure tries to indicate (1) that this model is consistent that only a small number of users will become active contributors, (2) that users can make different kinds of contributions (e.g.: in the 3D-Warehouse: some users will contribute new models, others will improve, tag and rate existing models, or create collections of existing models as curators), and (3) power users and local developers will emerge [Nardi, 1993].

Figure 3: Model-3 — Democratizing Design: Making all Voices Heard
Previous Work
Our research in the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design (L3D) over the last decade has been focused on conceptual frameworks and system building efforts to explore design and domain-oriented design environments and opportunities and mechanisms to support individual creativity. This past research can be characterized by the following global objectives:
• empowering users rather than replacing or deskilling them by emphasizing an intelligence augmentation perspective [Bobrow, 1991; Fischer & Nakakoji, 1992];
• advancing human-computer interaction to human problem-domain interaction, by putting owners of problems in charge [Fischer et al., 2004; von Hippel, 2005];
• supporting reflective practitioners by increasing the back-talk of design artifacts and linking action and reflection spaces [Fischer et al., 1998; Schön, 1983];
• exploring breakdowns and critiquing as sources for creativity [Fischer, 1994b];
• transcending desktop-based computing by integrating physical and computational environments [Arias et al., 2000]; and
• creating open and evolvable systems grounded in the seeding, evolutionary growth, reseeding process model [Fischer et al., 2001].
Over the last few years, we have actively participated with other researchers in:
• co-organizing a NSF supported workshop in June 2005 on “Creativity Support Tools” [Shneiderman et al., 2006];
• co-organizing a major conference [CC2007, 2007] in June 2007 on “Creativity and Cognition” (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007/); and
• participating in NSF efforts to frame new research programs in “Science of Design” and “Creativity and IT” (http://swiki.cs.colorado.edu:3232/CreativeIT/14).
Building upon this understanding of design and individual creativity and its support with computational environments derived from these past research activities will provide us with the foundation to explore the themes of this research proposal: social creativity and democratizing design.
Results from Prior NSF Research
The proposed research also builds upon the results of previous NSF projects leading to numerous scientific publications (see Reference section) and to the development of conceptual frameworks and innovative systems that have been used by other research and industrial organizations as building blocks for their own research. Previous grants most relevant to the proposed research include:
• G. Fischer and R. McCall, “Supporting Collaborative Design with Integrated Knowledge-Based Design Environments,” 1990-1993, $700,000 (#IRI-9015441). This grant was an early attempt to develop environments to support reflective practitioners in different domains with domain-oriented design environments. The results included empowering domain designers; supporting long-term, indirect collaboration; supporting reflection-in-action [Fischer, 1994a]; recoding design rationale; understanding the inherent cognitive difficulties in software reuse; and developing tools in support of software reuse [Fischer et al., 1996].
• G. Fischer, J. Ostwald, and G. Stahl, “Conceptual Frameworks and Computational Support for Organizational Memories and Organizational Learning,” 1997-2000, $700,000 (#IRI-9711951). This grant focused on developing living organizational memories to support collaborative design, especially over the temporal dimension. The results included initial development of the seeding, evolutionary growth, reseeding model [Fischer et al., 2001] and support for knowledge management [Fischer & Ostwald, 2001].
• G. Fischer and Y. Ye, “A Social-Technical Approach to the Evolutionary Construction of Reusable Software Component Repositories,” 2002-2004, $160,000 (#CCR-0204277). This grant created an active reuse environment supporting information delivery [Ye, 2001; Ye & Fischer, 2005] and a deeper understanding of the co-evolution of open source systems and communities [Ye et al., 2004].
• G. Fischer, E. Arias, H. Eden, and M. Eisenberg, “Social Creativity and Meta-Design in Lifelong Learning Communities,” 2001-2004, $1,192,353,000 (#REC-0106976). This grant developed initial conceptual frameworks for social creativity [Fischer, 2000] and meta-design [Fischer et al., 2004] as well as innovative technologies such as the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory [Arias et al., 2000].
Related Work
Our understanding of design is grounded in Simon’s definition [Simon, 1996]: “design studies how things ought to be”. Because there are no natural laws governing designed artifacts, creativity is a critical concept for the design thinking, design processes, and design artifacts. Our early work with critiquing systems and exploiting breakdowns was influenced by Schön’s “Reflective Practitioner” [Schön, 1983] concepts: to create situation which talk back to the designer supporting reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action to be more creative in design [Fischer et al., 1998].
To explore the concept of social creativity was influenced by investigating complex design problems (in software design, in urban planning, in learning environments) that transcend the individual human mind. Csikszentmihalyi [Csikszentmihalyi, 1996] provides a deep analysis of creativity and he argues from the very beginning: “an idea or product that deserves the label ‘creative’ arises from the synergy of many source and not only from the mind of a single person. It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively. And a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flushing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work.” Bennis and Biederman [Bennis & Biederman, 1997] have studied groups which have developed outstanding artifacts and innovations (including Xerox Parc’s impact on modern computers, Disney’s first animated movies) providing further evidence that creative collaborations are necessary for complex design problems. Their arguments are further strengthened by John-Steiner [John-Steiner, 2000] analysis of mutually supportive partnerships.
Open source [Raymond & Young, 2001] was one of the first efforts to engage and support self-motivated people all over the world to contribute to the development of complex artifacts. The fundamental innovation has moved center stage and environments based on user-generated content have become widespread including the following examples: (1) encyclopedias (such as: Wikipedia); (2) scientific collections (such as: GenBank); (3) shared picture and movie environments (such as: Flickr and YouTube); (4) massive multiplayer online games (such as: Ultima Online); and (5) collaboratively constructed virtual environments (such as: Second Life). Influenced by these developments, a number of books and concept have appeared creating initial frameworks and analytical models to understand and interpret these developments in a coherent fashion:
• Benkler [Benkler, 2006] provides a framework to understand the possibilities of networked information communities and their transformational impact on ownership, authority, privacy, and freedom;
• Tapscott and Williams [Tapscott & Williams, 2006] explore ‘Wikinomics’ and explain how collaboration and communication technologies are democratizing the creation of value;
• von Hippel [von Hippel, 2005] documents numerous examples of user-generated innovations.
These developments have raised interesting controversial issues whether there is a “Wisdom of Crowds” [Surowiecki, 2005] or whether the world will suffer from an overload of mediocre products and ideas [Doctorow, 2006; Lanier, 2006]. In addition, some researchers have identified interesting phenomena that we consider relevant and that we will explore in our proposed research including: “The Tipping Point” [Gladwell, 2000] and “The Long Tail” [Anderson, 2006].
The assessment of social creativity and design represents an important research challenge. While controlled experimental studies with subjects have their place [Mary Lou Maher & Mi Jeong Kim, 2005], the essence of understanding creativity and design requires an understanding of the unique contributions in authentic situations and with engaged and self-motivated stakeholders [Csikszentmihalyi et al., 1993]. Rigor, replicability, and generalizability have to be complemented by relevance, imagination, engagement, motivation and uniqueness in addressing complex design problems [Janis, 1972; Schön, 1983]. Ethnographic approaches, interviews, and participants observations [Nardi, 1997] embedded in long-term studies are needed requiring substantial effort, time, and commitment by all participants.
The impact on education is another important aspect of research in creativity that relates to problems of transdisciplinary collaboration [National-Research-Council, 2003], new opportunities for creative work [Florida, 2002], and the changing landscape of employment opportunities in a globalized world [Friedman, 2005] where routine cognitive work (specifically in information technology fields) is outsourced and off-shored [Aspray et al., 2006; Florida, 2005].
Proposed Research: Conceptual Framework
Social Creativity: Transcending the Individual Human Mind. The previous sections provided evidence that much of human creativity results from interaction with tools and artifacts and from collaborating with other individuals (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Bennis & Biederman 1997; John-Steiner, 2000). Our proposed research will develop a richer framework enabling knowledge workers of all kinds to understand and exploit the opportunities, challenges and principles of social creativity. It will explore creative processes and creative outcomes in the context of collaborative design activities.
Social Creativity as Creative Process. In complex design problems, the difference in knowledge, expertise, and perspectives that exist among individuals allows solutions that none of the participants could have understood by themselves; for example: scientific collaboratories [Kouzes et al., 1996] and “art and new media” collaborations [Candy & Edmonds, 2002; National-Research-Council, 2003] supersede what individuals could have done in isolation.
Our research will focus on understanding and identifying design principles and evaluation criteria to: (1) broaden the social milieu of creativity so that all voices are heard and more ideas and artifacts can be contributed; and (2) improve the quality of individual contributions so that more people can contribute more interesting ideas and artifacts. Specific research questions that we will explore are:
• What are the contributing factors to social creativity as creative process?
• Which interaction mechanisms between individual contributors (e.g. sharing, comparing, and critiquing mechanisms) can be designed to broaden the basis of people, ideas and artifacts that contribute to the social creative process?
• What software features and social infrastructures are needed to support motivation and risk-taking?
Social Creativity as Creative Outcome. Attributes of creativity are assigned socially to outcomes by peers and/or the public thereby providing social validation to be judged creative. Evaluation and validation are important to define and distinguish what is considered to be creative in different fields and domains [Csikszentmihalyi, 1996] and to encourage and motivate individuals in their creative endeavors [Amabile, 1996]. Social creativity as creative outcome needs to distinguish a truly creative social process from other forms of social interaction or behavior that are just ordinary.
Our research will focus on understanding and identifying design principles and evaluation criteria to: (1) support social validation of creativity; and (2) improve the overall quality of contributions.
To achieve these objectives, we will specifically explore, design and implement new curatorial mechanisms based on our initial analysis of different approaches (e.g.: in the Google 3D Warehouse, many people contribute 3D models of architectural buildings but only those models selected by professionals at Google will be included in Google Earth; in Wikipedia, only entries that have been substantiated, reviewed and approved make it beyond the “stub” status; in Flickr, where co-curation is explored (http://www.flickr.com/groups/curatorsresource/).
Specific research questions to be explored in our research are:
• What are the contributing factors to social creativity as creative outcome?
• What more sophisticated curatorial mechanisms for aggregating and re-aggregating contributed contents and ideas can be designed to support the evaluation and social validation of creative individuals and creative work?
• What other mechanisms are needed to foster the emergence and fluctuation of fields of individuals and domains of knowledge and practice in which evaluation and social validation of creativity, and consequently innovation can take place?
Democratizing Design: The Need for Multiple Voices in Design. To bring social creativity alive, participating stakeholders must be able to express themselves, combine different perspectives, and generate new understandings. Our proposed research will explore the assumption that in large and heterogeneous groups working together for long periods of time, distances and diversity between contributing individuals can enhance social creativity rather than hinder it. The challenge is not to reduce heterogeneity and specialization but to support it and manage it at both the technological and social level by finding ways to build bridges between individuals and exploiting conceptual collisions and breakdowns to stimulate imagination and invention. We will explore distances in multiple dimensions: (1) spatially (across physical distance), (2) temporally (across time), and (3) conceptually (across individuals, communities, and cultures) [Fischer, 2005]. By considering distances and diversity as critical factors, our research will provide foundations for social creativity by making all voices heard, harnessing diversity, and enabling people to be aware of and access each other’s work and ideas, relate them to their own, and contribute the results back to the community.
Meta-Design: Harnessing the Synergy of Many. Social creativity needs the “synergy of many” [Benkler, 2006], and this kind of synergy can be facilitated by meta-design. Meta-design is a socio-technical approach that characterizes objectives, techniques, and processes that allow users to act as designers and be creative in personally meaningful activities [Fischer et al., 2005]. Our proposed research will further develop the meta-design by keeping environments open to users’ modifications and adaptations by technical and social means that empower participation. This serves a double purpose: (1) to provide a potential source for new insights, new knowledge, and new understandings; and (2) to provide a dynamic way for groups, fields, and domains to evaluate and socially validate the creative attributes of outcomes and individuals. Meta-design can facilitate social creativity as a creative outcome by shifting the focus from finished products or complete solutions to conditions for many to explore mismatches and embrace new emerging opportunities during use, and by providing for a higher degree of synergy and self-organization.
Proposed Research: Developments
Social creativity is a multi-faceted concept and to gain an understanding of it requires different perspectives and application context. We have selected three application contexts in which we have initially explored social creativity. Table 1 provides a summary characterization (to simplify the table we have focused on the 3D-Warehouse rather than on all systems by Google described in section ??).
Table 1: Summary Characterization of the Three Applications
Applications EDC Wikis Google 3D-Warehouse
major focus complex artifacts designed by Communities of Interest individual contributions to a shared information repository a warehouse with ten thousands of 3D objects (integrated with SketchUp and GoogleEarth)
technology table top computing supporting face-to-face collaboration wiki paradigm: quickly editable web site
on-line warehouse, rating system, integration among g3d components
meta-design support mediated meta-design (developers are present) develop expressive, combinable components (plug-ins mash-ins) models are created with SketchUp
contributors symmetry of ignorance as a source of creativity wide range of different project teams design enthusiasts; covers to long tail
learning effort to be a contributor varies from small to substantial small substantial
motivation stakeholders engaged in personally meaningful problems — they want their voices heard support for communities; evolving shared content by decentralized contribution contributions to a valued repository; recognition of contribution and skill by millions of people
ownership individual artifacts are owned by Communities of Interest shared ownership (individual entries are evolved by all) models are owned by individuals
social validation a solution considered “satisfycing” by all stakeholders; generation of alternatives the content is heavily used and evolved rating scheme for models
number of participants approx 20 approx 200 many thousands

The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC)
The EDC [Arias et al., 2000] is a long-term research platform exploring conceptual frameworks for social creativity and democratizing design in the context of design problems. It brings together participants from various backgrounds to frame and solve ill-defined, open-ended design problems. The knowledge to understand, frame, and solve these problems does not already exist [Engeström, 2001] but is constructed and evolves during the solution process — an ideal environment to study social creativity.
where the answer is not known. It represents a socio-technical environment incorporating a number of innovative technologies including: table-top computing, the integration of physical and computational components supporting new interaction techniques, and an open architecture supporting meta-design activities.
The vision of the EDC is to provide contextualized support for reflection-in-action [Schön, 1983] within collaborative design activities. In our previous experiment with the EDC, we have observed:
• more creative solutions to urban planning problems can emerge from heterogeneous communities’ collective interactions with the environment;
• participants are engaged in personally meaningful activities and associate a purpose with their involvement;
• participants must be able to naturally express what they want to say;
• the interaction mechanisms must have “low threshold” and a “high ceiling” [Shneiderman];
• the representations of decisions and their consequences are easily shared by other users for them to reflect upon the decisions of each other; and
• conflicting actions and decisions are visualized with technology that participants can discuss them and reach consensus or explore further alternatives.
Obstacles to further testify these hypotheses rest with the difficulties of democratizing the design of the EDC by providing more control to the participants. Each urban planning problem is unique in that it has to take into consideration of the geography, culture, and population of the city. Currently, the EDC developers have to customize the system at the source code level to reflect the specific characteristics of the city and urban planning problem. In most cases, the EDC developers do not have sufficient knowledge of the problem and the social context; they do not know which issues are of greatest concern and which conflicts need to be resolved through the EDC system. The domain- and context-specific knowledge is sticky and hard to transfer from local urban planners to EDC developers.
The proposed research will create a more powerful meta-design environment (called “Scenario-Design-Kit (SDK)”) that will enable the participants to dynamically configure the EDC system to fit their specific needs without detailed knowledge of programming [Myers et al., 2006]. After SDK is created, we will test the newly added mechanism with urban planners. Furthermore, we will test specific EDC environments re-configured and customized by local urban planners with local citizens to investigate further whether the satisfaction of above 4 conditions lead to the emergence of creative solutions by ordinary citizens.
Next Generation Wikis
The basic assumption explored in our current small exploratory research grant is: “conventional Wikis have proven to be usable and useful to support communities, but one of their main limitations as they are applied to research in creativity and IT is their lack of support for different media types.” A consequence of this limitation is that communities (particularly those who are not focused on text) have only limited means to describe the research contributions in a variety of ways. Our research in the current grants has raised a set of new question which will be explored in the proposed research with respect to:
• meta-design: Wikis have always had the goal of being open, simple, and “low-threshold” environments; we will explore whether their zeal to be “quick” has lead to insufficient expressiveness for many creative tasks?;
• democratizing design: in order to make all voices heard in a community of collaborating researchers, a socio-technical environment is needed that allows all stakeholders to contribute in ways that fits their tasks and the stakeholders’ way of thinking and expressing themselves;
• social creativity: (1) how can we move the Wiki beyond being a content management system where individual contributions are accumulated but no dialog and interactions take place; (2) minority opinions are often lost in the rewriting of wiki items; we will develop new mechanisms to find minority views; (3) Wiki pages reflects the current consensus state of all users; the dialog of developing this consensus is lost and has to be reconstructed by users; we will develop mechanisms to illustrate change history so that users can view how the dialog developed.
• linking it with the EDC: the current reflection space in the EDC is created by the developers; using a Wiki will allow all participants to make contributions.
Google SketchUp + 3D Warehouse + Google Earth
The objective behind the integration of these three systems is to model the whole world in 3D and use Google Earth to explore this world. This desirable objective cannot be achieved by a development team at Google alone. It represents a unique, large-scale example to explore the conceptual framework for social creativity and meta-design.
SketchUp (http://sketchup.google.com/) is a successful 3D modeling environment.. SketchUp is a highly interactive, direct manipulation tool. While it is a high-functionality environment with a “low threshold and high ceiling”, developing sophisticated models with SketchUp requires a non-trivial learning effort. In order to motivate enough people (and make them independent of “high-tech scribes”), powerful learning mechanisms for SketchUp are critical to allow everyone who wants to contribute to learn doing so.
The 3D Warehouse (http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/) is an information repository for the collection of models created by all users who are willing to share their models. The 3D Warehouse contains thousands of models from different domains including buildings, houses, bridges, sculptures, cars, people, and pets. It supports collections to organize models and supports ratings and reviews by the participating community. It lets viewers connect with the owners of models.
Google Earth has the capability to show 3D objects that consist of users' submissions and were developed using SketchUp. Figure 1 shows the downtown area of the city of Denver populated by 3D buildings.

Figure 4: Downtown Denver in 3D
Figure 2 illustrates the interrelationship between the three systems that are integrated by supporting the following operations:
(1) share 3D models by uploading them from SketchUp to the 3D Warehouse;
(2) search, share, and store 3D models created in SketchUp in the 3D Warehouse;
(3) download existing 3D models from the 3D Warehouse to be modified and evolved in SketchUp;
(4) download models from the 3D Warehouse (4a) and from SketchUp (4b) and view them in Google Earth (if the models have a location on earth); and
(5) download a context or a model from Google Earth to SketchUp.

Figure 5: The Integration of SketchUp, 3D Warehouse, and Google Earth
Problems and proposed research. The proposed research will explore the specific problems:
• Problem-1: users acting as active contributors need to learn a high-functionality environment such as SketchUp; ? proposed research: in close collaboration with Google, we will further improve their currently available learning support mechanisms (including: video tutorials, tool tips, status prompts, user forums) by focusing on dynamic, context-sensitive help environments.
• Problem-2: the 3D-Warehouse grows and will quickly become difficult to navigate and search; ? proposed research: what are the effective mechanisms that enable users to find what they want so that they can take advantage of what others have contributed? We will develop a similar mechanism to the WWW View Source functionality: locating, comprehending, modifying and sharing examples [Fischer et al., 1991]. Whenever users want to create a 3D model, they can view what basic blocks from the 3D warehouse repository were used in constructing closely related models saving them time and effort that they can spend on their own creative extensions.
• Problem-3: When multiple models for one building existing, how do we decide which one should be shown, and how to deal with other models that have not been selected as the main representation? ? proposed research: we will develop a social curatorial mechanism that allows all participants to choose and criticize the models and to ensure the quality of user contributions (with tagging and ratings).. This curatorial mechanism will introduce a new role of a critic that can be assumed by any user. Critics review and comment on other models and such critiques will be assembled and integrated to provide guidance for other users to view the most suitable model. Critiques can be used as an alternative social validation mechanism to the current process in which the model to be displayed in GoogleEarth is chosen by the professionals at Google.
Proposed Research: Methodology
Research Design. To elicit and understand the rich interrelationships among technological systems, social phenomena, emergent community practices, individual motivation, and evolutionary processes that are necessary to support social creativity by democratizing design requires approaches that go beyond a single-perspective, positivist research design. The proposed project will pursue a design-based research approach, where meaning and understanding are constructed from the interplay among (1) theoretical frameworks that guide the research process; (2) analysis of existing systems and emerging behaviors and phenomena gleaned from success and failure cases; (3) the construction of designed systems to explore specific hypotheses uncovered during the investigatory process; and (4) assessment of the emerging theories and designs.
An initial explication of (1) is described in the theoretical framework discussion above. This process will continue throughout the research project. Much of the initial theoretical framework is also based on (2), and we will continue to explore and study other developments that provide insights into this research (our close relationship with Google will be invaluable to this element of our research). The design and development of systems (3), will be a major effort of the research; these developments and their use by targeted communities will provide us with insights into the core issues that they entail. However, to self-apply the theme of our research proposal, we do not view our developments as constrained to include only the perspectives of the researchers: our meta-design perspective leads to inclusion of participants in the development process hopefully providing rich sources of insights and innovation.
Assessment
Our approach towards assessment is based on the following basic premises: proper assessments are time consuming, expertise is rare, and standard assessment methods are often unsuitable to evaluate the kind of methods and systems in which we are interested. Social creativity and democratizing design are inadequately measured by traditional yardsticks.
Our assessment methodology will include a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods [Nardi, 1997; Radinsky, 2000] by combining both laboratory experiments and real-world evaluations. The obtained data will be used for guiding ongoing development (formative evaluation) and determining overall effectiveness (summative evaluation).
Our evaluations will explore the following specific design interventions (DIs):
• DI-1: Create socio-technical conditions for individuals to be interested enough and willing to make the additional effort so that their voices are heard. To enable users to articulate their voice, the technology used for articulation has to have a very low technical threshold. As users gets more involved, they should be able to use more sophisticated technology to articulate their concerns requiring support for a low-threshold and a high-ceiling and learning mechanisms supporting users to move progressively from low-threshold to high-ceiling.
(a) The focus in the EDC research will be on design mechanisms (ScenarioDesignKit) to lower the threshold of participation for creating models and scenarios.
(b) In the Wiki research we will develop more expressive capabilities to allow people to say more interesting things.
(c)In the Google research, we will improve learning support for SketchUp to allow contributors to move to highly expressive tools and will investigate whether such design interventions expand participations and stimulate social creativity.
• DI-2: Provide mechanisms for individuals to decide that they have something relevant to say. We will investigate design interventions that help users to formulate ideas and decide what to say by finding the opportunity of articulating unheard opinions and distinct voices, and by reacting to expressed views of others through critiquing, rebutting, or confirming.
(a) In the EDC, we will develop (i) new technologies that enhance face-to-face interactions by eliciting users’ tacit knowledge with provision of tangible objects that can be manipulated by users; (ii) amplify situational backtalk of user actions with visualization techniques; (3) investigate whether such technology leads to greater participation of users and the emergence of mutual understanding and socially creative outcome.
(b) In the Wiki, we will develop dynamic mechanisms to help users find opportunities and linkages among contributions of other users so that they can form their voice by reacting to expressed views of others, in order to create meaningful dialogs among all concerned users.
(c) In the Google research, we will develop mechanisms that provide hints about opportunities for contributions and matchmaking of skills and knowledge among local design groups, and mechanisms that support newcomers to find opportunities to apprentice with more experienced modelers by contributing sub-elements to larger elements.
• DI-3: Encourage individuals to express themselves in a way that others can understand what they are saying. Social creativity requires the mutual understanding of all stakeholders and we will investigate technical means that enhance the understanding of user articulation.
(a) In the EDC, we will investigate how boundary objects facilitate mutual understanding and engage all stakeholders into dialog and negotiating of meanings.
(b) In the Wiki, we will investigate whether richer representations that we will develop lead to increased mutual understanding and common ground.
(c) In the Google research, we will investigate whether the social curatorial mechanisms that we will introduce lead to dialog among users (both as model creators and model critics) so that the intentions and opinions of users are better understood.
• DI-4: Avoid the situation that voices get lost because there is too much information or their input does not get recorded. The value of users’ voice cannot be easily judged at the moment of their articulation. Some voices that are deemed of little value may become valuable at a later time when the context and problem situation changes. To avoid the loss of user voices, technological support is needed to record and store all voices, and to retrieve less heard voices when they become relevant.
(a) In the EDC, we will develop mechanisms to record and index all user voices and mechanisms to retrieve and revisit relevant voices on demand.
(b) In the Wiki, we will develop filtering and delivery techniques that allow focus on needed input, and identify especially those minority voices that are often overwhelmed by major voices to avoid the pitfalls of group-think.
(c) In the Google research, we will analyze the contribution patterns and encourage potential contributors to become participants to explore the power of the “long tail”.
Research Work Plan

Last modified 21 August 2011 at 10:48 am by haleden