An Inquiry into Crowdsourcing for Early-stage Product Design

The maturing of internet technologies has dramatically changed the way people work and—under the impact of the current health crisis—online collaboration and communication seem to demand increased attention. In this research, I investigate and review the concepts of crowdsourcing workflow and the pros and cons of some existing design tools that support crowdsourcing—a kind of workflow that uses the internet to collect work and insights from multiple actors. The investigation includes the characteristics, different categories of crowdsourcing, and its existing issues and challenges. Based on the study and analysis of these, I explored the potential of applying it to the field of design, summarized the several major challenges of crowdsourcing collaborative design tools, and proposed a set of design principles for the crowdsourcing platform that aims to help gather ideas in the early-stage of design. I also implemented a web-based design tool to illustrate these principles. Some relevant issues of crowdsourcing are also discussed. For example, I also discuss the compensation mechanism, user engagement, and some ethical issues in this research. At the end of the research, I also point out the topics and directions for future research in the field of applying crowdsourcing to early-stage design.