The design of the crowd: Organizing mass collaboration efforts

The potential for mass collaboration and concurrent engineering among individuals working on a design project allows for increased innovation in idea generation while also supporting the parallelization of project development. The former of these two benefits is highlighted by recent corporate initiatives to incorporate crowdsourcing in their design process. This is done in an effort to garner new and unique perspectives while also driving designs that carry greater acceptance from the community and/or intended market. The latter benefit is emphasized by the pronounced success of concurrent engineering projects which tend to reduce production costs, all while enhancing overall product performance. This work aims to exploit these two concepts in a structured and methodical crowd centered design framework. A simulated pool of individuals, representing the crowd, are used to form design groups using game-theoretic principles. The outcome of each sub-game aims to increase the overall improvement to the designed system by maximizing what each individual can potentially add to the project. The optimization of resource allocation is then performed where time spent on individual or collaborative efforts is determined. The proposed framework is applied to simplified design projects at their initial conception, before detailed mathematical design models are determined.