Crowd Design
The digital revolution is interwoven with the promise to empower the user. Yet, the rise of centralized, commercial platforms for crowdsourced work questions the validity of this narrative. In Crowd-Design, Florian Alexander Schmidt analyses the workings and the rhetoric of crowdsourced work platforms by comparing the way they address the masses today with historic notions of the crowd. The utopian concepts of early online collaboration are taken as a vantage point from which to view and critique current and, at times, dystopian applications of crowdsourced work. The study is focused on the crowdsourcing of design tasks, but these specific applications are used to examine the design of the more general mechanisms employed by the platform providers to motivate and control the crowds. Crowd-Design is as much about the crowdsourcing of design as it is about the design of crowdsourcing.
Design for the Crowd
Situated on Broadway between Fourteenth and Seventeenth Streets, Union Square occupies a central place in both the geography and the history of New York City. Though this compact space was originally designed in 1830 to beautify a residential neighborhood and boost property values, by the early days of the Civil War, New Yorkers had transformed Union Square into a gathering place for political debate and protest. As public use of the square changed, so, too, did its design. When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux redesigned the park in the late nineteenth century, they sought to enhance its potential as a space for the orderly expression of public sentiment. A few decades later, anarchists and Communist activists, including Emma Goldman, turned Union Square into a regular gathering place where they would advocate for radical change. In response, a series of city administrations and business groups sought to quash this unruly form of dissidence by remaking the square into a new kind of patriotic space. As Joanna Merwood-Salisbury shows us in Design for the Crowd, the history of Union Square illustrates ongoing debates over the proper organization of urban space—and competing images of the public that uses it. In this sweeping history of an iconic urban square, Merwood-Salisbury gives us a review of American political activism, philosophies of urban design, and the many ways in which a seemingly stable landmark can change through public engagement and design. Published with the support of Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
Using the Crowd to Design the Perfect Logo
Logos are one of the most essential components for business success. They must capture the essence of the product or company and be easily recognizable. Yet they are also the most disregarded aspects. Why? Because many business owners believe that they can create something simple, do-it-yourself concepts, but they end up being dull, ordinary, and plain. In Using the Crowd to Design the Perfect Logo, CJ Isakow reveals a simple, cost-effective, and potent way for any business owner to get a powerful logo that speaks to the heart of their business. From a skeleton of an idea, and the concepts of some amazing designers, there’s no reason to settle for just ‘good enough’ anymore when it comes to logos. When you still want to be involved in the process, and respect the logo enough to know you shouldn’t do it all by yourself, this is the quintessential book that will have you posting a brand new, amazing logo within a short amount of time utilizing 99Designs. Yes, it’s that easy, really.
Mobile Crowd Sensing: Incentive Mechanism Design
This SpringerBrief investigates and reviews the development and various applications of mobile crowd sensing (MCS). With the miniaturization of sensors and the popularity of smart mobile devices, MCS becomes a promising solution to efficiently collect different types of information, such as traffic conditions, air quality, temperature and more, which is covered in this brief. The features, novelty, and applications of MCS are elaborated in detail in this brief. In addition, the basic knowledge about auction theory and incentive mechanism design is introduced. Incentive mechanism design plays a key role in the success of MCS. With an efficient incentive mechanism, it is possible to attract enough mobile users to participate in a MCS system, thus enough high quality sensing data can be collected. Two types of incentive mechanisms with different system models are introduced in this brief. One is the reputation-aware incentive mechanism, and another is the social-aware incentive mechanism. This SpringerBrief covers the significance and the impacts of both reputation and social relationship of smartphone users (SUs) in MCS and presents extensive simulation results to demonstrate the good performance of the proposed incentive mechanisms compared with some existing counterparts. The target audience for this SpringerBrief is researchers and engineers in the area of wireless communication and networking, especially those who are interested in the mobile crowd sensing or incentive mechanism design. Meanwhile, it is also intended as a reference guide for advanced level students in the area of wireless communications and computer networks.
Organization Design
Advances in Strategic Management is dedicated to communicating innovative, new research that advances theory and practice in Strategic Management. This volume focuses on organization design and collaborative ways of working.
