Crowds: Visual Co-design via Rich Crowd-sourcing

Britta Kalkreuter(T&D) Mark Timmins(T&D) Mike Chantler(MACS)
Research student: D.Robb

This project seeks to use rich web and mobile applications to provide designers with near instantaneous highly visual feedback from thousands of potential customers.

Such a scheme will revolutionise design and market intelligence processes by enabling rapid, inspirational and iterated co-design cycles between crowds and designers. It will:

• enable crowds to provide emotive feedback in a visual language;
• give crowds a sense of ownership of the design process and provide enthusiastic target markets;
• inspire designers to rapidly evolve design ideas and cater for multiple sub-groups;
• provide added value by providing customers with a rich visual summary of the co-design process;
• significantly reduce time-to-market and the risks of producing unwanted product.

The project will use rich internet media (e.g. ShoogleIt) data mining, crowd sourcing and the design staff and students of SBC to research this sociotechnical system.

Two key technical challenges concern: providing fast intuitive navigation of rich media, and aggregation of visual feedback to provide an at-a-glance impression of the crowd’s perceptions.

The semiotic challenge lies in gaining a greater understanding of how fixed (or polysemous) image based feedback is as a means of communication between designers and consumers. This has implications also for the use of images in visual design itself.