Design at large

Designers in many fields rely on examples for inspiration, and examples play an important role in art and design curricula. Online media offer a corpus of examples at a scale and diversity never before seen. Design on the Web is not only large, it's also “at large.” This scale and diversity enable powerful new opportunities for learning, mining, understanding, and assessing design. My group's research tools harvest and synthesize examples to empower more people to design interactive systems, learners to acquire new skills, experts to be more creative, and programmers to engage in more design thinking. This research shapes my project-based design teaching, which emphasizes creating diverse alternatives, self-assessment, and using examples to provide design insights and teach abstract principles. To illustrate these opportunities — and the technical and social challenges — of design that is large and at-large, I'll focus on two recent projects in my group. The first explores peer assessment of design at a global scale. In 2012, we collaborated with Coursera to launch the first massive-scale class with self and peer assessment. This enabled online students to engage in open-ended design projects. It has also worked surprisingly well, and variants have since been used by more than 80 other massive online classes. The second project, Webzeitgeist, introduces a scalable platform for Web design mining. Applications built with this platform can dynamically curate design galleries, search for design alternatives, retarget content between page designs, and predict the semantic role of page elements from design data. In sharing this work, I'll try to impart some useful strategies and spark discussion on design research at large.