Congratulations to Northwestern’s Design for America’s team for their work featured on ABC news. Excellent job team!

Chicago Filmmaker Scott Drucker spend the summer recording Design for America and creating an informative overview video of our work. Thanks Scott!

We are hosting the the seventh annual Design:Chicago seminar.  The speakers will discuss “Leadership by Design”: how leaders structure their organizations to harness and use design of products, services, processes, and organizations as a competitive strength and opportunity for change in today’s corporate landscape. Leaders from Harley-Davidson Motor Co., Kitchen & Bath Americas at Kohler Co., Logitech International SA, Sonim Technologies, and Target Corporation will discuss Leadership by Design.

Crowdfunding is changing the way people realize their work by providing a new way to gain support from a distributed audience. This study seeks to understand the work of crowdfunding project creators in order to inform the design of crowdfunding support tools and systems. We conducted interviews with 30 project creators from three popular crowdfunding platforms in order to understand what tasks are involved and what tools people use to accomplish crowdfunding work. Initial results suggest that project creators carry out three main types of work—preparing the campaign material, marketing the project, and following through with project goals—and have adapted general support tools to facilitate doing this work. From our initial findings, we hope to improve and design future crowdfunding support tools and systems.

Creative individuals increasingly rely on online crowdfunding platforms to crowdsource funding for new ventures. For novice crowdfunding project creators, however, there are few resources to turn to for assistance in the planning of crowdfunding projects. We are building a tool for novice project creators to get feedback on their project designs. One component of this tool is a comparison to existing projects. As such, we have applied a variety of machine learning classifiers to learn the concept of a successful online crowdfunding project at the time of project launch. Currently our classifier can predict with roughly 68% accuracy, whether a project will be successful or not. The classification results will eventually power a prediction segment of the proposed feedback tool. Future work involves turning the results of the machine learning algorithms into human-readable content and integrating this content into the feedback tool (pdf).

Join us next week for our talk at the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work exploring the Future of Crowd Work.

Abstract: 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, focusing on assembly-line piecework. Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate? This paper frames the major challenges that stand in the way of this goal. Drawing on theory from organizational behavior and distributed computing, as well as direct feedback from workers, we outline a framework that will enable crowd work that is complex, collaborative, and sustainable. The framework lays out research challenges in twelve major areas: workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, real-time response, synchronous collaboration, quality control, crowds guiding AIs, AIs guiding crowds, platforms, job design, reputation, and motivation.

Check out this article in Architect Magazine investigating what the Millennials who have grown up with social computing will mean for Architecture.

Join me for my talk at Carnegie Mellon’s Crowdsouring Seminar titled, Do-it-Together: the Role of Crowdsourcing in Innovation.

Innovation is critical to our economic and social prosperity. Yet acquiring the required resources is especially difficult for novice innovators, who lack competence and confidence. Crowdsourcing has the potential to change this. I present two projects. First, I present my latest research on crowdfunding and tools to support the exchange of resources from a distributed network of individuals online. Second, I present efforts to engage the crowd in ideation and decision-making. I discuss implications for the innovation process and crowdsourcing.

On behalf of Design for America, I am honored that Good Magazine noted our organization an organization changing the way we learn in 2012.