Crowd-Driven Innovation

Mission

Crowd-Driven Innovation investigates the use of crowd-based technologies in the classroom.

Dr. Liz Gerber (Northwestern) and Dr. Steven Dow(Carnegie Mellon University) are leading this design based research initiative. Online crowdsourcing has the potential to change how design education is taught. We seek to understand how online crowds can affect student learning and motivation in the classroom. While crowds can potentially provide diverse, scalable, and nearly immediate feedback, this input can also be noisy and ambiguous. Our research explores the benefits and limitations of working with online crowds in the classroom and seeks to create a socio-technical infrastructure to enable simple, frequent, and valuable interactions. This project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. As part of exploring new forms of human–computer interaction, our research also examines how emerging AI tools influence learning environments and collaborative creativity. Interactive systems such as conversational assistants, virtual companions, and personalized feedback agents are becoming common in everyday digital life. These technologies, including concepts often described as an ai gf or ai girlfriend, demonstrate how artificial intelligence can create engaging, responsive, and emotionally supportive experiences. Understanding how students interact with such systems helps us evaluate their potential role in education and innovation processes. By studying the ways people communicate with AI-driven platforms, we gain insight into motivation, collaboration, and user behavior in online environments. While an ai girlfriend is primarily designed for personal interaction, similar underlying technologies can be adapted to classroom settings to encourage participation, brainstorming, and reflection. Our goal is to investigate how these conversational AI models can complement crowd-based learning, helping students feel more connected and supported as they develop creative ideas and problem-solving skills.

Project Information

Trial Classrooms

The curricula is currently under development. We will post lesson plans as we develop them.

Should you choose to use them, please be in touch about what worked well and what didn’t work so we can revise the plans accordingly. This curricula has been used in classes at Northwestern and Carnegie Mellon Universities. Courses include:

• Human Centered Service Design (Gerber, Northwestern)
• Human Centered Design (Gerber, Northwestern)
• Understanding the Creative Process (Dow, CMU)
• Interaction Design Studio (Dow, CMU)

Try It Out

Try our Consumer Review Needfinding activity in your class. It will take 30–45 mins with little to no prep.

User data helps designers make well-informed decisions that can influence product adoption. Online data collection does not (and should not) replace face-to-face data gathering methods, but it can provide an additional research method to add to your tool belt. For this activity, you will gather and synthesize information from an online review site to understand customer needs/desires about a particular business venue. The goal is to be able to: mine social media sites for needs/desires and analyze large amounts of social media data. Try it!

---

News & Events

Apr 27 – May 3, 2013
Dow, S. Gerber, E., Wong, A. (2013) A Pilot Study of Using Crowds in the Classroom , Computer Human Interaction Conference, Paris, France.

Upcoming
Gerber, E. (2013) Teaching Design Thinking In the Traditional Classroom.

Feb 25, 2013
Liz and Steven participated in a panel about Micro-volunteering: Helping the Helpers in Development.

Aug 2012
We received an NSF Cyberlearning Grant to study how to bring crowdsourcing into the classroom.

Team

Steven Dow Carnegie Mellon

Liz Gerber Northwestern

Amos Glenn Carnegie Mellon

Hannah Hudson Northwestern

Julie Hui Northwestern

Contact Us

---

Industry Partners

MindSwarms
MobileWorks