Lixiu Yu

Cooks or cobblers?: crowd creativity through combination

A sketch combination system is introduced and tested: a crowd of 1047 participated in an iterative process of design, evaluation and combination. Specifically, participants in a crowdsourcing marketplace sketched chairs for children. One crowd created a first generation of chairs, and then successive crowds created new generations by combining the chairs made by previous crowds. Other participants evaluated the chairs. The crowd judged the chairs from the third generation more creative than those from the first generation. An analysis of the design evolution shows that participants inherited and modified presented features, and also added new features. These findings suggest that crowd based design processes may be effective, and point the way toward computer-human interactions that might further encourage crowd creativity.

The crowdsourcing design space

Crowdsourcing is a new kind of organizational structure, one that is conducive to large amounts of short parallel work: thousands of individuals may work for several minutes on tasks, their outputs aggregated into a useful product or service. The dimensions of this new organizational form are described. Areas for future research are identified, focusing on open-ended tasks and the coordination structures that might foster collective creativity.

Representing category and continuum: visualizing thought

Abstract thought has roots in the spatial world. Abstractions are expressed in the ways things are arranged in the world as well as the ways people talk and gesture. Mappings to the page should be better when they are congruent, that is, when the abstract concept matches the spatial one. Congruent mappings can be revealed in peoples performance and preferences. Congruence is supported here for visual representations of continuum and category. Congruently mapping a continuous concept, frequency, to a continuous visual variable and mapping a categorical concept, class inclusion, to a categorical visual variable were preferred and led to better performance than the reverse mappings.

Feature selection in crowd creativity

Crowdsourcing is emerging as a wellspring of creative designs. This paper examines the mechanisms that support collective design. A sequential combination system is described: one crowd generates designs, and another crowd combines these designs. Previous experiments showed that the combined designs were judged more creative than the initial designs. The current work extends this previous research by examining the combination process of the designs more closely, looking at how features of the designs were selected and integrated into later designs. Participants preferred atypical features to typical ones for integration, and given a choice, selected practical but less atypical features over impractical but more atypical features. We conclude that crowds attend to both novelty and practicality of the features, and that the presence of atypical yet practical features contributes to the increased creativity of the combined designs.

Crowd creativity through combination

The goal of this research is to perform large-scale experiments to see if the crowd, mediated by technology, produces creative designs by combining designs. To fulfill this goal, a sequential combination system is built. The system is a variant on a human based genetic algorithm, through which the crowd participates in an iterative process of design, evaluation, and combination. The study will provide a way of creatively solving problems in a number of different domains. It will also shed light on the mechanisms of social creativity: how individuals can build on each others work and how technology can facilitate design by encouraging collaboration through shared designs.

Discovering perceptions of personal social networks through diagrams

By examining diagrams created by study participants, we can gain insight into their perceptions of their personal social networks. In this study, we found that participants made use of both position and distance to differentiate the roles of those in their networks and express intimacy. This work has implication for both the elicitation and visualization of social networks.

Combining concept maps to catalyze creativity

Combining concept maps aids creative problem solving. In two studies, participants were presented with a story describing a problem and its solution. They were then asked to read an analogous problem and provide a solution. In order to facilitate transfer from the first story to the second, concept maps of the stories were elicited and participants instructed to combine them. The results show that participants were more likely to solve the problem when they produced and combined concept maps, as compared to a condition in which concept maps were used without combination, and compared to a condition in which no maps were used, but instead summaries were created and combined.