While it was a while ago, as part of my group Product Development Partnership for Engineers Without Borders (EWB) and Vigyan Ashram to develop Bamboo as a Structural Component, I submitted a paper and presented at the 2010 EWB-UK conference. Inside the nice big proceedings booklet you can find our paper amongst other great works presented on Habitat, Water/Sanitation, Energy, and Research in Practice.
For my final year (5th) of MEng Product Design Engineering at the University of Strathclyde, one of my two “minor” projects was a research study/dissertation. For this I was investigating Crowdsourcing for Engineering where I focussed on Symmetry Detection. My aim was to Identify where Crowdsourcing with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk might be applied to benefit traditional engineering processes.
The jumping point for this was the previous work of my department Crowdsourcing Research Group and their newest paper, soon to be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development on “Open Innovation, Closed Societies” titled “Outsourcing Labour to the Cloud”. These studies have investigated Canonical Views, Shape Clustering and the newest and most exciting, Strip Packing, all fascinating experiments well worth reading about.
While the referencing is not as good as I would like it because of my last minute rush submission (as often happens), I am sharing them here, the following is the main body text and an addendum explaining an extra experiment I performed.
Leake_Gavin_Crowdsourcing_for_Engineering.pdf
Leake_Gavin_Crowdsourcing_for_Engineering_Addendum.pdf
The project also required a final, 12 minute (powerpoint) presentation/Q&A that I am also sharing as a PDF with notes.
Leake_Gavin_Crowdsourcing_for_Engineering_Presentation_with_Notes.pdf
I am still fascinated but for now my investigations are over while I focus on my other major and minor projects of the RepRap 3d Printer and Bamboo as a Structural Component for EWB. With the evolving environment of Crowdsourcing there is massive potential and scope for Engineering problems to be solved this way, I look forward to the development of this field.
