DESIGN INNOVATIONSEGAL DESIGN INSTITUTE
at the McCORMICK SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

"Learning through Collective Intelligence"

The ‘collective’ part of collective intelligence can feel simultaneously uplifting (“we all contribute!”) and surprising (“I thought you needed to be an expert?”). People often have this same pair of feelings about human-centered design. A partial resolution I (and many of us) offer to these reactions is, “it depends on what you mean by expert. Each of us is an expert in our own lives, which can offers a unique perspective. Also, it’s handy to anchor insights in a concrete setting.” One belief that animates both fields is that we’re not restricted to choosing between expert innovation and collective innovation as they exist today. Experts can take a cue from anthropology and embed themselves in a domain to get more situated insights. And we can create and share knowledge and tools that help a wider group of people innovate. For the past 6 years, I’ve worked in online education as both a researcher and practitioner, trying to scale the learning that happens in a design studio to the globe. I’ll share insights from my group’s empirical research and software platforms working toward this goal. A traditional design degree (or PhD or MD) provides focused, multi-year training in a discipline. Some of what’s taught is necessarily cumulative, building on what came before. However, online learning materials of many types show that bite-sized learning is often possible and really useful. How might collective intelligence benefit by weaving focused learning modules (both domain knowledge and process strategies) into an innovation architecture? I’ll share insights and challenges that have emerged from my group’s work — including peer review, scientific discovery, and creativity support—that provide careful process guidance and place focused learning experiences at the point where they’re needed (as opposed to, say, in your ninth grade biology class). This helps collective intelligence participants gain "micro-expertise" and make more creative, practical, and innovate contributions. With such complex sociotechnical systems, a lot of the behavior is emergent, scale-dependent, and importantly different around the globe. This makes moving from the lab to the wild especially important. So along the way I’ll reflect on how the web has dramatically improved our ability to do this Design at Large: creating research that is used around the world for people’s own goals, and improving our knowledge through experiments on these platforms that compare alternatives.

Meet Scott

Scott is a Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science & Engineering at UC San Diego, where he co-founded the Design Lab. He previously served as Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, where he co-directed the HCI Group, held the Bredt Faculty Scholar chair, and was a founding participant in the d.school. He has a PhD in CS from Berkeley and a dual BA in Art-Semiotics and Computer Science from Brown (with Graphic Design work at RISD).

His former graduate students are leading professors (at Berkeley, CMU, UCSD, & UIUC), researchers (Google & Adobe), founders (including Instagram & Pulse), social entrepreneurs, and engineers.

Scott launched the first MOOC to feature open-ended creative work in spring 2012. The peer-review approaches he helped develop are used by major MOOC platforms, touching thousands of learners every day. His group publishes on these topics, disseminating their advances through widely-used open-source software. His course grew into the Interaction Design specialization, designated as one of the ‘most coveted’ Coursera certificates. All together, around 300,000 learners have signed up for his courses.

He has been awarded the Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize, Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER award, and Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship. Eleven of his papers were awarded best paper or honorable mention at top HCI venues. He is program co-chair of Learning@Scale '18, and was program co-chair for UIST, the CHI systems area, and HCIC. He advises university design programs globally.

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