Leveraging Online Communities for Novice Designers

While universities teach students how to build new products, few students choose to further implement their work due to limited resources and mentorship. Theories of learning and innovation describe the importance of working in a social context to acquire resources from peers. While HCI researchers have built recommender and expert routing systems to identify help givers, novice designers still fail to contact expert peers for various psychological reasons, such as fear of contacting someone older or more experienced. By designing online tools and platforms that encourage and scaffold that act of help-seeking, we can connect more designers with informal mentors who can help them improve and implement their work as a professional product. The goal of my dissertation is to support help-seeking among novice designers by 1) developing an emergent model of help-seeking behavior in the context of crowdfunding, and building a tool that 2) recommends potential help-givers from one's social network and 3) presents their information in a way that encourages reaching out for advice.