Crowd vs. crowd: large-scale cooperative design through open team competition

Abstract

Following the recent remarkable successes of crowdsourcing, there have been attempts to apply it to design. However a design problem is often too complex and difficult to break down into simpler, distributable tasks as required by the conventional crowdsourcing model. In this paper, we present Crowd vs. Crowd (CvC), a novel design crowdsourcing method, where several design teams made up of designers and crowd compete with each other. In each team, a designer coordinates effective communication between the crowd members and takes responsibility for the final design output, and the crowd contributes at different stages of design. We conducted an initial evaluation of CvC in comparison with other collaborative design methods, and found that: CvC can attract more people to participate; the crowd can make useful contribution in CvC; CvC can produce competent design outputs. We then applied CvC to two real-life design problems: first, designing a new logo for a university department; second, for a small tech company. With quantitative and qualitative analyses on these applications, we observed that the elements of competition and collaboration helped to sustain the crowd’s motivation to participate, and to produce quality design outcomes with higher level of satisfaction for the stakeholders.