Elizabeth M. Gerber

The future of crowd work

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.

Crowdfunding: Motivations and deterrents for participation

Crowdfunding is changing how, why, and which ideas are brought into existence. With the increasing number of crowdfunded projects, it is important to understand what drives people to either create or fund these projects. To shed light on this new social phenomenon, we present a grounded theory of motivation informed by the first cross-platform qualitative study of the crowdfunding community. By performing 83 semistructured interviews, we uncover creator motivations, which include the desire to raise funds, expand awareness of work, connect with others, gain approval, maintain control, and learn; and supporter motivations, which include the desire to collect rewards, help others, support causes, and be part of a community. We also explore deterrents to crowdfunding participation, including, among creators, fear of failure, and, for supporters, lack of trust. Based on these findings, we provide three emergent design principles to inform the design of effective crowdfunding platforms and support tools.Crowdfunding is changing how, why, and which ideas are brought into existence. With the increasing number of crowdfunded projects, it is important to understand what drives people to either create or fund these projects. To shed light on this new social phenomenon, we present a grounded theory of motivation informed by the first cross-platform qualitative study of the crowdfunding community. By performing 83 semistructured interviews, we uncover creator motivations, which include the desire to raise funds, expand awareness of work, connect with others, gain approval, maintain control, and learn; and supporter motivations, which include the desire to collect rewards, help others, support causes, and be part of a community. We also explore deterrents to crowdfunding participation, including, among creators, fear of failure, and, for supporters, lack of trust. Based on these findings, we provide three emergent design principles to inform the design of effective crowdfunding platforms and support tools.

Understanding the role of community in crowdfunding work

Crowdfunding provides a new opportunity for entrepre-neurs to launch ventures without having to rely on traditional funding mechanisms, such as banks and angel investing. Despite its rapid growth, we understand little about how crowdfunding users build ad hoc online communities to undertake this new way of performing entrepreneurial work. To better understand this phenomenon, we performed a qualitative study of 47 entrepreneurs who use crowdfunding platforms to raise funds for their projects. We identify community efforts to support crowdfunding work, such as providing mentorship to novices, giving feedback on campaign presentation, and building a repository of example projects to serve as models. We also identify where community efforts and technologies succeed and fail at support-ing the work in order to inform the design of crowdfunding support tools and systems.

Crowdfunding support tools: predicting success & failure

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.

Affective computational priming and creativity

While studies have shown that affect influences creativity, few investigate how affect influences creative performance with creativity support tools. Drawing from methods commonly used in psychology research, we present affective computational priming, a new method for manipulating affect using digitally embedded stimuli. We present two studies that explore computational techniques for inducing positive, neutral, and negative affect and examine their impact on idea generation with creativity support tools. Our results suggest that positive affective computational priming positively influences the quality of ideas generated. We discuss opportunities for future HCI research and offer practical applications of affective computational priming.

How Managers Use Multiple Media: Discrepant Events, Power, and Timing in Redundant Communication

Several recent studies have found that managers engage in redundant communication; that is, they send the same message to the same recipient sequentially through two or more unique media. Given how busy most managers are, and how much information their subordinates receive on a daily basis, this practice seems, initially, quite puzzling. We conducted an ethnographic investigation to examine the nature of events that compelled managers to engage in redundant communication. Our study of the communication patterns of project managers in six companies across three industries indicates that redundant communication is a response to unexpected endogenous or exogenous threats to meeting work goals. Managers used two distinct forms of redundant communication to mobilize team members toward mitigating potentially threatening discrepant events—unforeseen disruptive occurrences during the regular course of work. Managers with positional power over team members reactively followed up on a single communication when their attempt to communicate the existence of a threatening discrepant event failed, and they determined that a second communication was needed to enable its joint interpretation and to gain buy-in. In contrast, managers without positional power over team members proactively used redundant communication to enroll team members in the interpretation process—leading team members to believe that they had come up with the idea that completion of their project was under threat—and then to solidify those interpretations. Moreover, findings indicate that managers used different types of technologies for these sequential pairings based on whether their motivation was simply to transmit a communication of threat or to persuade people that a threat existed. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory about, and the practice of, technologically mediated communication, power, and interpretation in organizations.

A pilot study of using crowds in the classroom

Industry relies on higher education to prepare students for careers in innovation. Fulfilling this obligation is especially difficult in classroom settings, which often lack authentic interaction with the outside world. Online crowdsourcing has the potential to change this. Our research explores if and how online crowds can support student learning in the classroom. We explore how scalable, diverse, immediate (and often ambiguous and conflicting) input from online crowds affects student learning and motivation for project-based innovation work. In a pilot study with three classrooms, we explore interactions with the crowd at four key stages of the innovation process: needfinding, ideating, testing, and pitching. Students reported that online crowds helped them quickly and inexpensively identify needs and uncover issues with early-stage prototypes, although they favored face-to-face interactions for more contextual feed-back. We share early evidence and discuss implications for creating a socio-technical infrastructure to more effectively use crowdsourcing in education.

Learning to fail: experiencing public failure online through crowdfunding

Online crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter are gaining attention among novice creatives as an effective platform for funding their ventures and engaging in creative work with others. However, a focus on financial success of crowdfunding has obscured the fact that over 58% of crowdfunding projects fail to achieve their funding goals. This population of failed creatives however, gives us an audience to study public creative failure in an online environment. We draw inspiration from work in organizational behavior on failure, and work in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) on online behavior, to study online public failure. Using a mixed-methods approach with data scraped from Kickstarter and interview data with failed crowdfunding project creators, we answer the following question: What do project creators on crowdfunding platforms learn and change through the process of failing? We find that creators who relaunch their projects succeed 43% of the time, and that most individuals find failure to be a positive experience. We conclude the paper with a series of design implications for future creative platforms where public failure is part of the creative process.

Improvisation principles and techniques for design

Existing research addresses how designers create tools to support improvisation, yet little research explores how improvisation offers tools to support design work. This paper explores the potential relationship between improvisation and design, examining how design can benefit from improvisation. The paper argues that improvisation can build perspectives and skills that are critical for designers, such as creative collaboration, fostering innovation, supporting spontaneity, learning through error, and presenting ideas. The paper reviews the use of improvisation activities by designers in a multi-case study. The applications are analyzed to demonstrate individual and group level outcomes in design work.

Understanding and leveraging social networks for crowdfunding: opportunities and challenges

Crowdfunding provides a new way for creatives to share their work and acquire resources from their social network to influence what new ideas are realized. Yet, we understand very little about this growing phenomenon. Grounded in existing work on social network analysis, we interview 58 crowdfunding project creators to investigate how crowdfunders use their social network to reach their campaign goals. We identified three main challenges, which include understanding network capabilities, activating network connections, and expanding network reach. From our findings, we develop initial design implications for support tools to help crowdfunding project creators better understand and leverage their social network.