A crowdsourced design experiment using free-hand sketch design method based on the cDesign framework

In the age of ubiquitous, global Internet the process of product design is no longer confined to individuals or groups of employees but can be carried out by the combined efforts of many people through systematic, iterative processes. Although the literature reports several qualitative experiments, the process of specifying the details of an Human-based Genetic Algorithms process has been less considered. This paper reports the results of an experimental assessment of a generative design task that has been crowdsourced by an HBGA process specified by application of the Crowdsourced Design (cDesign) framework.Additionally, the application of free-hand sketch method in crowdsourced design task is firstly introduced based on the cDesign framework. The paper first describes the cDesign framework used to structure the creation of a car key fob design task on a commercial crowdsourcing platform and then presents the results to test the effectiveness of the free-hand sketch method in cDesign. The paper concludes that the free-hand sketch method can be well applied in the HBGA cDesign framework and cDEC assessment methodology effectively to generate creative design solutions.