Crowdsourced Fabrication
C. Ailie Fraser, Tovi Grossman, and George Fitzmaurice. 2017. WeBuild: Automatically Distributing Assembly Tasks Among Collocated Workers to Improve Coordination. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1817-1830. DOI: https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/10.1145/3025453.3026036
Summary:
There are many existed challenges in current large-scale fabrication. The organization, development, and planning of these production processes and the specialized knowledge and skill set necessary to use these tools are all problems which could impede large-scale fabrication in crowdsourcing. To solve these problems, the author proposed a novel model of crowdsourced fabrication and presented a set of design principles for developing crowdsourced fabrication systems.
The total experience is about connecting individual tensegrity modules to construct a tall bamboo pavilion in construction space under the introduction of Apple watch.
The experience of participants is made of several processes, check-in, location guidance training, stick gathering, preloading, loading, stick measuring, thread winding, node gathering, unloading, and adding the part to the structure.
There are five design principles are proposed in this paper. D1, Just in time learning and guidance. D2, unobtrusive technology. D3, Worker safety. D4, increasing coordination and efficiency, and D5, active analytics.
As for the results of the experiment, most participants rated it as very positive, with no participants rating it negatively. Participants also tended to be positive with all steps rated as more straightforward than challenging. However, there are still several steps that participants considered as challenging. And according to the results, most participants rated generally positive. More than half of them thought these experiments and tasks are extremely useful and very useful.
Reflection:
I think that the participant demographics is kind of important. Because the usual crowdsourcing is a combination of lots of different people with different ages, genders, jobs, and so on. And I really like this experiment, because this task is not so difficult and could be done easily. Combining with wearable guidance is quite a great idea.
Under the introduction of wearable devices, participants could easily know what to do next and how to do this task. And the color pointed in tensegrity modules is also an amazing design. Using different color could guide participants where this module should be set, which connector should be connected.
Based on the time consuming of each ring completed, we can easily find people finished this task much more quickly than the past. They are getting familiar with this task.
And what I am curious most is the apple watch. Because apple watch can provide with texts and pictures to guide participants on what to do next and how to do that. I am wondering would it be better than using audio guidance by headphones?
Using audio information may be better than pictures and texts.
Discussion:
What about considering using audio guidance by earphones or headphones? Or the combination of these two things.
To be honest, I think using the smartwatch as one support devices may be too expensive for a large-scale crowdsourcing fabrication. Is there any way can decrease the cost of this kind of experiment?