Design Activity through Open Collaboration

This study proposes acknowledging that open collaboration as the one of design activities and that the open collaboration has different features compared to the conventional, ownership-based designing activities. Initially, the cases of open collaboration projects were collected and they were divided into 3 types based on their commonalities. Among Competitive type, Hierarchical type, and Heterogeneous type, founded Heterogeneous type is the most similar to the solution generation process of conventional design activity, and thus chose it as the main object of this research. The grounded theory method, a qualitative approach, has been employed to analyze the context in which the selected 1,065 game creature designs of Spore was created by the participants of Sporepedia, as it corresponds to Heterogeneous type. The following elements turned out to be the key factors through which the participants acquire design activity: Unlimited copy and modification; the influence of "celebrities" who improve the level of design quality and participation; and collaborative activities, such as creature contest.