The role of remixing for innovation in online innovation communities

Potentially innovative ideas are being generated, shared, and even remixed (recombined) in the online innovation communities. These ideas create new innovations through remixing of ideas. In this study, we investigate how remixing makes ideas more innovative in online innovation communities. Our model is validated through ordinary least squares regression on a secondary dataset of 57,049 ideas collected from one of the largest 3D printing online innovation communities, Thingiverse.com. The result shows that the number of prior ideas has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the idea\u27s degree of innovation and the cross-boundary remix has a positive effect on the idea’s degree of innovation

Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd to Address Societal Challenges: Revisiting the Knowledge Reuse for Innovation Process through Analytics

Societal challenges can be addressed not only by experts but also by crowds. Crowdsourcing provides a way to engage a crowd to contribute to the solutions of some of the biggest challenges of our era: how to cut our carbon footprint, how to address worldwide epidemic of chronic disease, and how to achieve sustainable development. Isolated crowd-based solutions in online communities are not always creative and innovative. Hence, remixing has been developed as a way to enable idea evolution and integration, and to harness reusable innovative solutions. Understanding the generativity of remixing is essential to leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to solve societal challenges. At its best, remixing can promote online community engagement, as well as support comprehensive and innovative solution generation. Organizers can maintain an active online community, community members can collectively innovate and learn, and, as a result, society can find new ways to solve important problems. We address what affects the generativity of a remix by revisiting the knowledge reuse for innovation process model. We analyze the reuse of proposals in Climate CoLab, an online innovation community that aims to address global climate change issues. Our application of several analytical methods to study factors that may contribute to the generativity of a remix reveals that remixes that include prevalent topics and integration metaknowledge are more generative. We conclude by suggesting strategies and tools that can help online communities better harness collective intelligence for addressing societal challenges

Software project work in an African context:myths, maps and messes

Research in HCI and CSCW has consistently shown how software design approaches are an abstract idealisation of work practices, raising questions regarding the appropriateness and applicability of what might be considered as ‘best practice’ or ‘doable practice’ in project work. Such issues have magnified the fundamental need for examining exactly how conventional (and generally Western) constructs, approaches and methods, widely adopted in the process of producing and deploying technologies, actually work. The paper reports findings from a study that seeks to understand the implications for adopting ‘well-known’ practices for framing, undertaking, and analysis distributed and collaborative software project in the context of Nigeria. Findings show that documenting and analysing what is often considered as ‘best practice’, supposedly prescriptive maps and scripts for accomplishing work, necessitates considering how they get adopted, interpreted, and extended as ‘orderly’ and occasionally ‘messy’ alternatives, offering some sensitivities for understanding the translocal features and transitional meaning of agile project work

Warm Solutions: Medical Making & Collaborative Infrastructure for Care

Making, as an activity and culture, enables people to participate in technological innovation at non-traditional sites. In healthcare settings, medical makers undertake activities as a part of routine, professional care practice. Their collaborative process occurs at the intersection of centralized healthcare systems and decentralized maker technologies with reflexive opportunities for human-centered design. In my research, I propose a critical view of medical making as an opportunity to reposition the power to participate in design within traditional healthcare practice. I develop my thesis from multiple efforts in a wide ecosystem of medical makers across private and public practice, STEM institutions, academic research labs, and non-profit groups. I apply Science and Technology Studies (STS) and HCI theories to analyze stakeholder efforts in relation to long-term patient-centered care infrastructure. Embedded in practice, infrastructure becomes visible in relation to its use. In my dissertation, I develop an understanding of how stakeholders in healthcare settings and networks influence care infrastructure with maker technologies. I do this by foregrounding the norms, values, and expertise related to stakeholder participation across three sections. First, I re-locate the site where physician-led making begins from labs to the bedside – as safe, reliable, small-scale prototypes. Second, I re-frame the importance of medical making, with lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, when grassroot- and institutional makers repaired temporary manufacturing breakdowns by creating reliable medical supplies. Third, I re-center the role of point-of-care medical makers, highlighting present-day nurse contributions as makers and contrasting their historically undocumented contributions in routine care. My research work culminates in a discussion of the human infrastructure, in addition to information systems, required to design environments for innovation based on the case study of medical making. For HCI researchers, this work first diversifies design values of novelty to include healthcare values of safety, reliability, and verifiability in collaborative systems, and second, extrapolates lessons from medical making to build fair, equitable, and sustainable infrastructure for collaboration between experts and non-experts. From these value-driven insights, I hope my work further contributes practical, methodological, and ethical implications for multiple stakeholders including policymakers and researchers.Ph.D

Education Technology Design and Deployment in HCI4D:A Nigerian Perspective

The decolonisation of knowledge has shown significant impact in reframing the understanding of technology as a means to the development of African communities. However, post-development narratives in HCI4D have failed to explicate how situated and grassroot alternatives can inform the innovative design of diverse perspectives and experience. As such, this thesis approaches this fundamental gap in our understanding of the practice of technology design and deployment by problematising conventional approaches for understanding, designing, and deploying educational technologies in the context of Nigeria. Through the adoption of a range of indigenous sensitivities, the thesis seeks to develop candidate approaches for analysing diverse cultural perspectives and for designing technologies that embody and extend them. Through the thematic analysis of empirical data, the thesis shows how stereotypical approaches to educational research and technology design presents postcolonial narratives of innovation in Nigeria as neo-colonial design agenda’s that needed to be appropriated in line with emerging conditions and relations in Africa. The interpretive analysis of the perspective of stakeholders in three Universities shows the relevance of developing context-specific pedagogical approach relevant to the politics of decolonialise blended education. The analysis also attempts to revive the arguments about the processes of technology diffusion and acceptance, showing the relevance and limit of traditional models for understanding the acceptance or rejection of technologies in an educational context. Using the Wittgensteinian approach of Winch and a range of Feminist positionalities, I attempted showing how a situated epistemological orientation can bring about envisioning alternative’s ways of articulating and translating transnational encounters and exchange of technological innovation. The sensitization and evaluation of the mundane practice of three software development firm shows the mythology of design innovation in/from Africa. This led to the consideration of how reframing the basic assumption about creativity from Africa could present African culture of innovation not merely as a passive space for the transfer and appropriation of technology but as a transitional space where innovate practices get regenerated and redistributed across already polarised boundaries of innovation. Finally, the thesis argues for an ‘ontological’ framing of designing localised and indigenous technologies. Through critical reflection on a range of issues associated with post-colonialism and post-development, I examine the possibilities that various historical tropes might offer to the reinvention of the African perspective on innovation. This leads to the consideration of how engaging in critical discussions about the future dimensions of African HCI can allow for grappling with the effect of the coloniality of being, power and knowledge. Developing on the ideas of futuring as a way of dealing with the complexities of the present – in this case the coloniality of the imagination - the thesis ends by discussing three tactical propositions for ‘remembering’ future identities of African innovation where the values of autonomy are known and acted upon

The antecedents of remix

10.1145/2531602.2531730Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW1011-102