What do people want from the Mass Collaboration service platform to vitalize design col-laboration? This research explores the feature elements of internet services that can build a co-creating community supporting Mass Collaboration. Mass collaboration is a form of collective activities that produce outcomes through collaborative projects performed in com-munities and their individuals. Thanks to internet technology such as Web 2.0, products de-signed by nonprofessional designers in a community can be the outcomes of Mass Collabo-ration. This community action combines each designer's behaviors, asynchronous discus-sions and comments on each design draft, and the gallery displaying the artifacts. In the per-spective of design research, the unfinished objects cause another participant to modify them and redesign them. This is an unusual subject, for conventional design research describes design as an independent activity. To understand designers' need for developing the Mass Collaboration system, design research is the most appropriate domain.
In spite of the recent increased interest in collective intelligence and Crowdsourcing, design-oriented collaboration has not been widespread as expected for a decade. Recent stud-ies explain that it is due to the discord between the community entities, the mismatched ruling policy, the uneven level of experience and profession, and the cultural and ideological differ-ences in culture. However, the author questions whether design behavior requires different conditions and features of Mass Collaboration since the designers consider the ownership of a design more critically than the knowledge-based collaboration of the participants. Designers think the design outcomes are their responsibility since they are emotionally engaged. In addition, the motivation to make their artifacts better is connected to their ownership.
The author assumed that the designer-behavior-friendly features of the Mass Collabo-ration service can help to amplify the participation of design behavior. The hypothesis of this research is that the motivation of Mass Collaboration designers is different from that of Wik-ipedia authors and that the difference relies on the ownership of artifacts, which affects the collaboration behavior. This research is approached from two directions, namely, to figure out the designers' motivation of collaboration in the community, and to confirm the assump-tion. Firstly, as an online-observation, to find the ideal co-creation model, the sporepedia.com and windowfarms.org communities are analyzed. The working model of the community and collaboration system, the features of sharing and securing ownership, and highly-skilled creator celebrities and their leadership for a project, have been found. The in-terface of Sporepedia authoring tools is specially designed to prevent the artifact from being stolen. It automatically tags the original author's information in the creation, so that creators cannot resist sharing their designs with the community. Secondly, the analysis of the survey to understand the priority of features to support designers in the community implicates that Mass Collaboration for design activity should be different with other collaborations, such as Wikipedia. Based on the literature reviews that conclude the research frameworks for collab-oration models, it synthesizes collaboration motivations tables with existing related research and extracts the index for the questionnaires to examine participants' intentions. The survey of total 100 participants of Minecraft designers and Korean Wiki-authors with the index implies significant differences between two types of collaboration.
Base on the findings from the observation and the survey, this research conclude of the major motivation of contribution is individual's altruism. Empirical studies results show the all motivations are strongly related to the altruistic motivation and participants' motivation of reputation and self-development were subordinate. Their creativity is pointing to satisfac-tion and recognition by others who want to play with their artifacts and that is the definition of their altruism. The thesis advises several directions for implication of the system of Mass Collaboration for design activity. First of all, the system should emphasize the individual participants related to each artifact since designers want to be recognized for their work; this seems to be the top priority of participants in collective projects. Many Wikipedians believe the success of a common project has more value than expressing oneself with the project. Also, they strongly believe that writing wiki articles is a contribution to society, and shouldn't be someone's property. Besides, the participants think that they have also participated in the community project and they want to be distinguished and recognized as skilled-professional, not having their ownership compromised. The second direction in a leadership of collabora-tion is a meritocracy. Collaboration projects are often organized as a holopism, in which par-ticipants contribute their ideas and designs under a tacitly compromised mutual goal and di-rection, and it is managed by a few chosen managers. But designers have a propensity to fol-low famous and skilled people in the community. As the designers' collateral purpose of con-tributing their artifacts demonstrates their creativity and craftsmanship, they often blindly fol-low the direction suggested by skilled celebrities. In conclusion, this research shows that a design-activity-supporting system should be different from conventional, knowledge-based collaboration, and the working structure needs to adopt holoptic but highly skilled practition-er-lead projects.
To vitalize the Mass Collaboration system is important, considering the expansion of software services throughout the world. Users want to find the user-developed applications and designed outcomes and adopt them into their ordinary lives without effort. Well-designed Mass Collaboration systems will help contributors submit and modify their idea with less hesitation than the current social, computer-supported collaboration systems.
대규모 협업은 온라인 소셜 소프트웨어의 기능을 통해 공통의 관심사를 가진 다양한 배경의 사람들이 모여 커뮤니티를 형성하고, 커뮤니티의 목적을 명확히 한 후, 개별적 참여를 통해 커뮤니티에 기여하는 협력 방식을 말한다. 이때 개별적 참여 방식이 여러가지가 존재하며, 문서를 입력하거나, 위치정보를 공유하는 방식에서부터 특정한 생산품을 디자인해야 하는 경우까지 다양하다. 본 연구는 이 대규모 협업에서 개별적 참여로서 디자인 행위를 하는 경우에 주목하고 그 행위를 촉진시키기 위한 방법에 대해 논의하는 연구이다. 본 연구에서는 개인이 커뮤니티 집단을 위해 분명한 창의력을 활용한 문제 해결행위, 조형물 생산행위 등, 다시 말해 디자인 능력을 활용하는 행위에 집중하여 설명한다. 대규모 협업은, 창작물의 변형형태가 많이 발생하고, 참여자들 개별적인 요구사항을 모두 반영할 수 있어, 경제적 중요성으로서도 주목을 받고 있다. 뿐만 아니라, 다양한 이해당사자들과 충분한 협의를 거쳐 디자인 행위를 할 수 있는 여건이 형성되어 있어, NGO와 같은 사회적 커뮤니티나 이해당사자들이 상당히 많은 지역 커뮤니티를 위한 문제 해결에 적절할 것으로 보인다. 한편, 대규모 협업에서 참여자들은 협업 결과물을 활용하거나 생산을 목적하고 방문하는데, 생산이 충분해야 해당 협업 커뮤니티의 질적 상승이 이뤄질 수 있고, 사용을 목적으로 한 참여자들이 혜택을 입을 수 있다는 점에서 생산의 촉진은 대규모 협업의 필수적 요소라고 할 수 있다.
본 연구는 협력 참여 행위의 핵심을 두 가지로 추렸다. 생산의 핵심 활동인 디자인 활동을 촉진시키는 여건들을 확인하는 것과 디자인 활동에서 정보를 수집하고 의사결정에 도움을 주는 사회적 활동을 촉진하는 두가지 방향을 연구했다. 이를 위해 디자인 행위가 이뤄질 수 있는 대규모 협업의 유형들을 정의하였다. 유형은 3가지로 구분되었는데, 공동 목표 모델 (Shared-Goal Model), 진화모델 (Evolution Model), 그리고 대규모 공진화 모델(Mass Coevolution Mod-el)이다. 이중에서 대규모 공진화 모델이 기존의 디자인 활동과 가장 유사하며, 문제를 효과적으로 해결할 수 있는 모델로 판단하었다. 대규모 공진화 모델의 상세한 요소들을 검토하기 위해 게임 Spore와 Minecraft를 공진화 모델의 대표로 지정하고 질적,양적 연구를 통해 이들의 활동에서 발견되는 특질들을 정리하였다. Spore의 연구를 위해 대조군으로 공동 목표 모델인 Windowfarms를 Online Observation으로 분석하였다. 결과로, 복제 및 변형 과정을 기반으로 하는 참여모델을 가진 Spore는 명성 획득을 기대하는 호혜적 활동이 핵심적 참여 동기였다. 진화형 모델의 대표로 선정한 Wikipedia 의 참여자들과 Minecraft 개발자들을 대상으로 참여의 주요 동기들을 비교하는 설문에서, 참여자들의 주요 동기는 즐거움이었으며, Minecraft개발자들은 동료들에 대한 호혜, 개인의 발전을 주요 동기로 뽑았다. 동기요소의 비교는 이전 연구들에서 진행된 오픈소스 개발 커뮤니티, Wikipedia 커뮤니티의 동기와 비교하기 용이하며, 결론적으로 디자인의 대규모 협업에서의 특징을 부각시킬 수 있었다. 또한 동기에서 유추된 시스템 요구사항을 토대로, 디자인의 대규모 활동을 위해 고려할 수 있는 시스템 요소들을 무엇인지 도출하였다.