Author Archives: Rick Marzec

Top 11 reasons you should ignore top 10 or top 100 lists: Metropolis Mag:

Last month, Public Interest Design named me as one of the top 100 people re-imagining the world. As honored as I am – and please do put me on all your lists! – I couldn’t help but think that “top” lists are exactly the opposite of innovation. Herewith, the top 11 reasons to ignore all those lists that you’re not on.

11. Lists are issued by the kind of people who are always talking. Innovation comes from those at the fringes who don’t have time to write lists. Do you think Alexander Graham Bell was worrying about other scientists’ ideas when he invented the telephone—or was he following his hunch that one might be able to hear sound over a wire?

10. Lists describe the world in generalities. Innovation comes from attending to detail. Apple engineers optically scanned people’s ear cavities, built 100 mockups of the Apple EarPod, and then asked more than 600 people to jump up and down, run, shake their heads—all with the intention to create the recently introduced earplug that stays in the ear in all in extreme heat and extreme cold. Can you put that process in a list item?

9. Lists are limited. The best idea is sometimes number 1,203. In 1946, frustrated with leaky cloth diapers, Marion O’Brien Donovan—in a desperate last resort—cut up the shower curtain in her bathroom and sewed a diaper to prevent leaks. Many iterations later, she patented the first reusable diaper cover made from nylon parachute cloth. The “boater,” as she called it, was the precursor to today’s disposable diaper. What if Donovan had stopped at iteration ten? Would we still be leaking?

Read the full article at Metropolis Magazine

 

Forbes.com: 4 Daily Habits of Game Changing Social Innovators

When we think about social innovation, we tend to focus on the outcomes—assistive technology for the blind, work for the underemployed, housing for the homeless. But it’s people who work day after day to come up with new ideas and realize better solutions to social challenges. What are these changemakers doing on a day-to-day basis, when not receiving MacArthur Genius Grants for their work? And could you be doing the same? Read the article at Forbes.com

Understanding Crowdfunding Work: Implications for Support Tools WIP to appear at CHI 2013

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.

Crowdfunding: A Resource Exchange Perspective WIP to appear in CHI 2013

Online crowdfunding has gained attention among novice entrepreneurs as an effective platform for funding their ventures. However, a focus on the financial nature of the relationship has obscured the complex interpersonal in- teractions involving the exchange of non-financial re- sources. Drawing from resource exchange theory in the marketing literature, we look at the exchange of re- sources and the mechanisms that facilitate this exchange in online crowdfunding. We analyzed 81 popular online crowdfunding platforms to reveal the exchange of various resources including: money, love, information, status, goods, and services through mediated, unmediated, and hybrid structures. Using resource exchange theory as a lens, we examine crowdfunding as a new type of crowdwork platform and explain how resource exchange theory can help the HCI community understand new, crowdwork platforms (CHI2013_Crowdfunding_AResourceExchangePerspective)

Crowdfunding Support Tools WIP to appear in CHI 2013

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 for our talk on the Future of Crowd Work at CSCW 2013

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.