Crowds & Creativity
Mike Krieger
Stanford HCI Group
Adobe Plerk Workshop

Big Picture
How can we tap into
the creative potential
of online crowds?

Big Picture Outline
1. C urrent projects
How can we tap into 2. When do crowds
the creative potential ma ke sense for a
of online crowds? project?
3. How can we design
for better
collaboration &
creativity?
(4 principles)

Wisdom of ...or tyranny
the crowd... of the
m asses?

Positive traits
diversity of
background,
expertise, thoughts,
ideas
power in numbers
“collective
intelligence”
validation &
feedback

Successful
Projects

Evaluating Scenarios
6

Evaluating Scenarios
6

Evaluating Scenarios
6

7

7

7

“Persona lly I think the
Reactions idea fr om storyboard g.
one is m ore compellin
“Personally I prefer the idea The re ason for this is
of storyboard one. This is that I would be ding out
because the user freely in terested in fin ation
walks around the museum as inte resting inform work
they would traditionally, yet about a piece of art at
automatically receive info or a par ticular artist th
about exhibits - a virtual I couldn't just get at the
guide without user input. museum . The map of
Much more impressive.” th e museum is an get
som ething that I c
at the museum on a
pie ce of paper that to be
does n't require me
pulling out my phone
and wast ing the battery
to get t o an exhibit.”

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the
Coffee
Shop!
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Hi Phil!
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Why sucessful?
fun activities
hidden ambitions
small, parallelized
tasks
encouraging
experimentation &
iteration
right representation

Not-so-
successful
ones

Why not
sucessful?
lack of conceptual
integrity
lack of constructive
behavior
asking too much, or
in the wrong way

9 guidelines
1. When diversity 6. Lea rn from hacks,
matters mods, re-use from
crowd
2. Small chunks/
delegate-able 7. Enable novel
actions knowledge
discovery
3. Easy verification
8. Maintain vision &
4. Fun activity, or des ign consistency
hidden ambition
9 . Not just about
5. Better than lowering costs
computers at
performing a task

Designing
for crowd
creativity
to let them run
wild, you need
careful design &
constraints

Project:
Crowd
Brai nstorming

In
brainstorming,
constructive
“yes,
ideation is and...”
critical

Current
systems look
like Digg...

Current
systems look
like Digg...

S o folks act
like they’re on
Digg
(no constructive
ideation)

Our project:
Ideas2Ideas

Our project:
Ideas2Ideas

Our project:
Ideas2Ideas Dell IdeaStorm Clone
Non-building ideas 35 52
Ideas2Ideas
Constructive ideas 43 25
!2 test of independence = 10.8776, p < 0.001

2 design
principles
1. the value of
designing for
constructive
ideation
2. reducing
staleness by
visualizing “long
tail” of crowd
contributions

Project 2
Not just building
off ideas, but
others’ work as
well

Project 2
Not just building
off ideas, but
others’ work as
well Wi kiTasks

Question
How does the
Wikipedia crowd
of editors
organize their
actions (to-dos),
on a personal
and site-wide
level?

Insights
1. Bottom-up 4 . Disconnect
structure between
ind ividual & site-
2. Existing system wide goals
doesn’t encourage
“next action” thinking 5. La ck of support
for contextual
3. Lack of triage discovery

WikiTasks
Prototype

WikiTasks
Prototype

Findings
Lowers barriers to
participation
Encourages
collaborative task-
making
70% of completed
actions originated
from someone else

design
principles
1. Contextual display 2. Sliding scale of
of task and work part icipation and
information alongside bottom-up
crowd’s work creation

wrapping it up
1. strong potential for
creative crowds
2. but need to
consider right
applications for
crowds
3. and keep design
principles in mind
when building
“crowd-powered”
sites

thanks!
Scott Klemmer &
Joel Brandt for
guidance and
feedback
mkrieger@hci.stanford.edu C ollaborators &
Wikipedia
participants
Eve ryone here for
participating