Everyone loves the crowd these days. The collective mind, proponents say, can do everything from mapping crime to funding wacky art projects to solving the world’s toughest mathematical conundrums. But even those who tout the wisdom of crowds for tasks that can be broken up into pieces, or for problems that have one right answer, might doubt those hordes could ever be truly creative.
Surely real creativity, the elusive stuff of game-changing ideas and innovative solutions, cannot be outsourced to the masses.
'Innovation comes from taking one idea from one place, another idea from another place, and combining features of both to come up with something new'Oh yes it can, says Jeffrey Nickerson, an information systems researcher at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. In recent paper presented at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference this May, he demonstrates how it might be possible to harness the energy of the crowd to produce creative ideas.
Starting with a pretty cool kid’s chair.
New online tools make assembling large crowds relatively easy, Nickerson says, but collaboration is a little trickier. With a crowd of hundreds of people scattered across the globe, a group discussion is somewhat unpractical. So instead of having people speak to each other, his system allows people to "speak through the things they produce." All it takes is a crowdsourcing marketplace, free design software, and an organizational process that mimics natural evolution.
Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk and the Google Docs drawing platform, Nickerson and colleagues first recruited a crowd to design a chair for children. The initial sketches became the "parents" of the next generation of designs, created by a new crowd combining and building upon what they liked from the first. In that way, each “generation” was a combination of the best features from the previous one.
This continued for three generations – an iterative process of design, selection and combination – until Nickerson had a total of 200 chair sketches. The last generation of chairs was rated (by yet another crowd) as more creative, practical, and superior to the first.
“Innovation comes from taking one idea from one place, another idea from another place, and combining features of both to come up with something new,” says Nickerson. His system – which he describes as a human based genetic algorithm – just divides the innovation process between computers and humans. The computer manages the workflow; the crowd does the actual combining of ideas.
And the crowd-based combination technique may have applications beyond creative furniture design – it could help address real world problems. In another project last summer, Nickerson asked a crowd to propose solutions to fixing the oil spill in the gulf. The most original ideas emerged in the last generation.
Of course, original or creative doesn’t necessarily mean better (as anyone who remembers the bizarre capping “solutions” to the BP oil spill can attest to). But Nickerson hopes that by exploring how web technologies can coordinate crowds, we can develop the best structures for catalyzing creativity.
“Once we understand how this engine works,” he says, “we can put on more knobs and dials.”
Some of those knobs might include diversifying the crowd, recruiting more experts or specialists to add their own ideas and assess others. Another possibility would be to introduce more constraints, like production costs or material requirements.
Ultimately, in what seems like the ultimate meta-step of crowdsourcing, Nickerson imagines that the crowd could eventually control its own interaction, to produce the maximum creative output. “The engine itself could be turned over to the crowd,” says Nickerson, “to allow people to shape the crowdsourcing process itself.”
See Also: - Using Mechanical Turk to Crowdsource Humanitarian Response
