Strategies for Empowering Collective Design

Paper in proceeding, 2019

Collective activities such as crowdfunding, competitions, jams and
hackathons are gaining more attention in innovation management. However, within
the design domain such activities are often considered as a way for mass generation
of ideas, rather than processes for developing proper design solutions. Information
acquisition, gaining sufficient knowledge and generating feasible ideas are among the
main challenges of collective design. In this study we applied three strategies of rapid
design, informed participation, and knowledge sharing to overcome these
challenges. During a one-week design hackathon, we conducted a collective design
project in which three teams of participants conducted autoethnography research,
shared their findings by an idea crowdsourcing platform, and tested their 3D printed
prototypes with potential users. Although the tests showed efficiency of rapid design
and informed participation strategy, we did not find knowledge sharing effective,
mainly due to the absence of collaboration among teams.