Design Uncertainty in CrowdSourcing Systems

Crowd-sourcing social computing systems represent a new material for HCI designers. Crowd sourcing has been successfully applied to many areas, but these systems are difficult to reliably design and prototype. One source of uncertainty during design is the behavior of the crowd at different levels of scale. A second source of uncertainty during design is the crowd’s response to differing incentive functions. Using a research through design methodology we have constructed two crowd-sourcing systems where these two sources of uncertainty are central research problems to the design of both systems. This paper discusses these issues with respect to our implementations and discusses a research agenda designed to reduce the uncertainty associated with these design choices.