A CAD tool for supermind design

A CAD Tool For Supermind Design

by

El Bachir Boumhaout

B.S. Computer Science and Engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019

Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer

Science

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

at the

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

September 2020

c Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2020. All rights reserved.

Author . . . .

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

June 21, 2020

Certified by. . . .

Thomas W. Malone

Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management

Thesis Supervisor

Accepted by . . . .

Katrina LaCurts

Chair, Master of Engineering Thesis Committee

A CAD Tool For Supermind Design

by

El Bachir Boumhaout

Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science on June 21, 2020, in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Abstract

The rise of information technology has paved the way for a world that is more con-nected than ever before. This accelerated the prominence of collective intelligence as an attribute of groups and systems of individuals collaborating, or competing together to innovate and solve complex problems. We define these systems as super-minds. In this thesis, I present a CAD (Computer-Aided Design) tool for designing and configuring superminds. This tool is based on the supermind design methodol-ogy developed at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. It aims to enable users to generate innovative possibilities for how to design various systems, especially the ones with human-computer combinations. The design tool is augmented by a design library that hosts a knowledge base for organizational design, business activities, and processes. The library relies on systematic taxonomies to organize its content and in-troduces a new framework of how to think about process and knowledge management in organizational design. These software tools aim to make the supermind design methodology accessible, and allow managers, consultants, and others to design trans-formational projects that drive innovation and harnesses the collective intelligence of their organizations.

Thesis Supervisor: Thomas W. Malone

Acknowledgments

My utmost gratitude goes to my advisor Thomas W. Malone, whose innovative work on collective intelligence inspired this project. Without his guidance and persistent support, this project would not have been possible. His leadership, patience, and empathy have deeply inspired me. It was a great privilege and honor to work and study under his guidance.

I would like to express my deepest appreciation to the members of the MIT Cen-ter for Collective Intelligence and the supermind working group for their stimulating meetings and their continuous support and feedback.

In addition, I am highly indebted to Community Jameel, OCP Foundation and UM6P for their support during my undergraduate and graduate studies.

Contents

1 Introduction 13

1.1 Collective Intelligence and Superminds . . . 14

1.2 Motivation for Supermind Design . . . 14

1.2.1 Motivation . . . 14 1.2.2 Methodology . . . 15 1.2.3 Example . . . 19 1.3 Contributions . . . 20 1.4 Thesis Organization . . . 20 2 Background 23 2.1 Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together . . . 23

2.2 Organizational Design and Innovation . . . 24

2.3 Process Handbook and Organizing Business Knowledge Book . . . 25

3 Design 27 3.1 User Research and User Needs Analysis . . . 27

3.1.1 User Types . . . 27

3.1.2 Persona and Needs Analysis . . . 30

3.2 Supermind Design Library . . . 31

3.2.1 Goals . . . 31

3.3.1 Goals . . . 34

3.3.2 Specifications and Prototypes . . . 34

3.4 Prioritization, Storyboard, Analysis . . . 36

3.4.1 Value vs. Complexity . . . 36

3.4.2 Storyboard and Analysis . . . 39

4 Implementation 45 4.1 Technical Design and Technology Stack . . . 45

4.2 Data Models . . . 46

4.3 Final User Interfaces . . . 48

4.3.1 Supermind Design Library . . . 48

4.3.2 Supermind Design tool . . . 48

5 Extensions and Future work 53

List of Figures

1-1 Process for generating ideas [4] . . . 16

1-2 Sample of a sequence of ideas and conceptual moves leading to solutions 21 2-1 Types of superminds [1] . . . 24

2-2 Cognitive Processes of superminds [1] . . . 25

3-1 Value vs. complexity prioritization for the design library . . . 37

3-2 Value vs. complexity prioritization for the design tool . . . 38

3-3 UI wireframe I of the design Tool . . . 39

3-4 UI wireframe II of the design Tool . . . 40

3-5 UI wireframe III of the design Tool . . . 41

3-6 UI wireframe IV of the design Tool . . . 42

3-7 UI wireframe V of the design Tool . . . 43

3-8 UI wireframe VI of the design Tool . . . 44

4-1 Home page of the web application . . . 48

4-2 Explore page of the supermind design library . . . 49

4-3 Example of an entry in the design library . . . 49

4-4 Example of a search performed in the library . . . 50

4-5 A newly created board in the design tool . . . 50

4-6 An example of a user generating ideas and applying the methodology 51 4-7 An example of a user selecting a conceptual move to apply . . . 51

List of Tables

1.1 Conceptual Moves in the Supermind Design Methodology [4] . . . 18

3.1 Specifications of the supermind design library . . . 34

3.2 Specifications of the supermind design tool . . . 36

Chapter 1

Introduction

In the last few decades, computer intelligence has grown dramatically with the in-crease in computational power— thanks to Moore’s law —and the advancement in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Computers are becoming faster, smarter, and are now able to outperform humans on various recognition and prediction tasks that seemed unperceivable in the past. However, when it comes to unstructured prob-lem solving and non-routine physical work, human intelligence remains irreplaceable. It excels in scenarios where humans consistently demonstrate an ability to acquire and process new information and decide on what is relevant in a flood of undefined phenomena. These reasoning and meta-reasoning abilities are key to our intelligence. It is clear that intelligence, in its essence, takes many shapes and forms depending on its function, purpose, environment, etc. In particular, when a group of individuals decide to collaborate and work together over time and space in ways that seem intel-ligent, a new form of intelligence emerges—that is collective intelligence [1]. The openness of this definition allows many forms of intelligence to fit into this paradigm as an emerging area of study. In addition, it emphasizes the collectiveness of action taken by the group of individuals as a key characteristic that highlights its coop-erative nature. At its core, it harnesses untapped knowledge and experience of a connected network of individuals to generate new ideas, make informed decisions, or solve problems in new and innovative ways. These groups of individuals are what we consider superminds [1]. In fact, collective intelligence is the defining property of

1.1 Collective Intelligence and Superminds

There are many prototypical superminds that surround us, that we interact with, or that we are part of, intentionally or unintentionally. For instance, as a knowl-edge production site, Wikipedia is a supermind that is created and maintained by volunteers around the world. The collective intelligence of this community of volun-teers acting together powers what is, today, the world’s most popular encyclopedia. Another example of superminds is the non-profit Kiva which powers Kiva.org. The non-profit enables low-income entrepreneurs and students to receive loans financed by individuals from around the world. It was founded in 2005 with the mission to expand financial access to underserved communities and is now operating in 77 countries as of 2020 [3]. In particular, Kiva relies on local agents and partners to evaluate loan applicants and anyone from around the world can go to their website and lend money to applicants online. Kiva managed to create a supermind that is purpose-driven, connecting lenders to a network of field partners and small entrepreneurs, and push-ing the boundaries of microfinance. Linux, GNU, and other open source projects are also superminds exhibiting collective intelligence which highlight the power of open innovation in software development bringing to life many of the fundamental tech-nologies that the web is built upon today. It is noteworthy that superminds are all around us, each with different goals and complexity. The omnipresence of information technology paved the way for many new kinds of superminds as humans became more connected, enabling human-computer combinations to collaborate and harness their collective intelligence.

1.2 Motivation for Supermind Design

1.2.1 Motivation

The world has no shortage of problems that need to be solved. Challenges such as climate change, water scarcity, and infectious diseases are existential to humans. The complexity of such challenges dictates innovative collectively intelligent solutions.

Su-perminds are critical to addressing these challenges to coordinate effort and harness the power and resources of groups and communities. The ability to design effec-tive superminds starts with conceptualizing innovaeffec-tive, and sometimes unorthodox, ideas to address these challenges. Harnessing collective intelligence is at the core of supermind design.

1.2.2 Methodology

The question that arises is: How do we design superminds that enable a group of individuals to find innovative approaches and solutions to problems?

The work in this thesis is built upon the collective effort done at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence led by Prof. Thomas W. Malone that aims to establish a methodology for designing superminds. In particular, supermind design is the process of planning how to configure superminds. At its core, it pushes the user to generate numerous ideas on how to address problems by relying on a set of conceptual moves which can be used repeatedly to trigger more ideas [4].

The flowchart in in Fig 1-1 (Malone, 2020) , summarizes the process flow for generating ideas:

Figure 1-1: Process for generating ideas [4]

Specifically, the user starts with clearly framing and formulating the problem. This allows them to develop a deeper understanding of the issue to tackle, and its context. Afterward, the ideation process begins with the user listing any related problems, ideas, and solutions that come to mind. It is essentially a brain dump that provides a starting point to begin exploring from using the conceptual moves. Throughout the design process, users rely on these moves to facilitate the generation of various possibilities and novel approaches to solving their problem. The moves are split into basic, and advanced. The table below (Malone, 2020) lists the conceptual moves and their corresponding definitions:

Move Definition Example Basic Moves

Verbify

Reframe as an activity (Using a Verb)

• Car ! Travel by car

• Grocery Store ! Sell groceries Zoom in

Focus on a part • Sell groceries ! Stock Shelves • Develop cybersecurity strategy ! Analyze potential cybersecurity threats Zoom out

Focus on a larger whole of which this is a part of

• Stock shelves ! Sell groceries

Specialize

Focus on a spe-cific type (or a way of doing an activity)

• Sell Food ! Sell Food from truck

Generalize

Generalize to something broader of which this is a type

• Fly on plane ! Travel

Advanced Moves Cognify

Zoom in on cog-nitive processes

• Diagnose depression ! Sense symp-toms that might indicate depression Assign

Specialize an ac-tivity by deter-mining who will do it

• Answer customer questions ! Com-puter chatbots answer customer ques-tions

Groupify

View activity as being done by a group, not an in-dividual

• Team leader decides ! Team votes

Technify

Specialize an ac-tivity by identi-fying ways to use technology

• Manager assign people to tasks ! Online algorithm assigns people to tasks

Incentivize

Specialize by de-termining the in-centives to do an activity

• Product team designs new product ! Product team gets bonus if new prod-uct is successful Analogize Specialize by using analogies to suggest new ideas

• Sell dog-walking service ! Create the “Uber” of dog-walking

Table 1.1: Conceptual Moves in the Supermind Design Methodology [4]

While brainstorming, users are encouraged to polarize their thinking in multiple dimensions to push towards unconventional, or unfeasible ideas. The goal is to dis-cover new possibilities and undis-cover new ground. Lastly, the user can pick the ideas they find most promising to evaluate them and continue exploring further.

1.2.3 Example

To better understand how the methodology can be applied, let us consider the example of maternal death, which continues to be a problem in many developing countries. For instance, Sierra Leone has a maternal death rate of 1,165 deaths per 100,000 according to the United Nations Population Fund estimates in 2017 [5]. While in the US for instance, it is about 17.4 per 100,000 live births [6]. The sad truth is that the majority of these deaths can be easily prevented if proper care is available throughout the pregnancy period. The simple brainstorming below highlights one sequence of how the methodology can be applied with a sequence of conceptual moves leading to interesting solutions. In practice, users are expected to generate dozens or hundreds of possibilities.

1.3 Contributions

Alongside this thesis, I have developed a web application that hosts a design tool for building superminds. The tool allows organizations and individuals to apply the supermind design methodology to their problems of interest, ideate, and solve them. The design tool is powered by the Supermind Design Library which serves as a knowledge base that includes various business processes and activities, case studies, and a systematic taxonomy for organizing knowledge based on supermind design. I expect this work to have important implications for identifying new frameworks and workflows for designing collective intelligence that empowers organizations to shrink their innovation cycle, and solve complex problems.

1.4 Thesis Organization

The thesis is organized as follows:

In Chapter 2 (Background), I introduce previous related works that inspired su-permind design and this project specifically, including the Process Handbook project and Prof. Malone’s book, Superminds.

Next, in Chapter 3 (Design), I present a summary and analysis of the user research and design considerations and principles that guided the development of the design tool and the Supermind Design library.

Then, in Chapters 4 (Software Architecture and Implementation), I discuss the system architecture, data models and the technical consideration that went into de-veloping the software.

In Chapter 5 (Extensions and Future work), I evaluate the project and present future work and consideration to build on the design tool and library

Chapter 2

Background

This project is grounded within two areas of academic interest. The first is concerned with collective intelligence as a field of study and is rooted in Prof. Malone’s work on the concept of superminds. The second area of interest lies within the principles of organizational design theory and practice and how it drives innovation and strategy.

2.1 Superminds: The Surprising Power of People

and Computers Thinking Together

According to Prof. Malone, for superminds to be useful, they need to solve problems. In particular, the use of information technology to fuel their hyperconnectivity can lead to a much larger and stronger collective intelligence. Instead of focusing on how computer intelligence will replace humans, a pragmatic point of view will consider how computers and humans can collaborate to create more intelligent collective systems. Computers can be used as tools and assistants in superminds, enabling specialized intelligence. They can also be used as peers if we consider trading bots and industrial robots. When it comes to characterizing superminds, Prof. Malone identifies four kinds, based on their structure and decision-making scheme:

• Democracies: defined by voting as its primary decision-making mechanism. Ex-amples: board of directors, political parties, etc.

• Markets: a form of collective decision making where trading partners exchange things of value by their mutual agreement. Examples: App store, stock market, Airbnb

• Communities: tend to uphold shared norms and are governed by an informal consensus in decision-making. Examples: student clubs, labor unions, neigh-borhoods.

• Ecosystems: operate on the law of the jungle and the survival of the fittest. In particular, individuals interact without any overall framework for cooperation. Examples: political election, restaurant business, etc.

Figure 2-1: Types of superminds [1]

Superminds are wired to perform various tasks, but in their essence, they perform six basic cognitive processes: Create, Decide, Act, Learn, Remember, Sense. Each of these processes can help superminds to be effective and they constitute the building blocks of a supermind behaving intelligently. It starts with remembering previous experiences and sensing their environment. superminds are then able to create options on how to proceed and make decisions on how to act. This allows superminds to create a feedback loop that enables them to continuously learn and improve.

2.2 Organizational Design and Innovation

When it comes to organizational design, at its essence, it is concerned with construct-ing and changconstruct-ing an organization’s structure to achieve its goals [2]. In particular, it

Figure 2-2: Cognitive Processes of superminds [1]

seeks to build alignment across strategy, staffing, structure/process, and incentives. These elements define an organization’s design and identity, and are often catalysts for open innovation. In fact, when critical tasks are modularized and problem-solving knowledge is distributed and available, innovation boundaries become fluid and pli-able [7]. In this case, collective intelligence emerges as a property of intentional strategic organizational design. Thus, a deep understanding of individuals, processes, and inefficiency can be helpful for intense business innovation to take place [2].

2.3 Process Handbook and Organizing Business

Knowl-edge Book

Organizational knowledge varies considerably from one organization to another. It serves as a strategic asset that enables organizations to boost their efficiency and decision making ability. When it comes to managing organizational knowledge, The MIT Process Handbook project was designed with the goal of providing a theoretical and empirical foundation for enterprise modeling, integration tasks, and process re-engineering [6]. In practice, organizational design is a complex and messy endeavor. Specifically, it varies by the type of organizations, industries, strategic goals,

chal-abstraction able to organize knowledge of any kind of activity and process [2]. No-tions such as specialization, coordination, and inheritance were introduced to enable such classification framework. In addition, the handbook was powered by a set of software tools that users relied on to redesign and reinvent existing organizational processes, and automatically generate software to support them. This project builds on the content and the ideas presented in the MIT Process Handbook to develop taxonomies to organize the knowledge base as part of the design library.

Chapter 3

Design

3.1 User Research and User Needs Analysis

3.1.1 User Types

The design and development of the supermind design tool and library were guided by a user-centered design approach. It started with defining who the users are and empathizing with their needs and goals. This requires a clear understanding of our users’ motivations and requirements, and relying on their feedback to guide the devel-opment process. User-centered design is particularly important since it ensures the system achieves its usability goals which might include:

- How easy it is to learn how to use it - How easy it is to remember how to use it

- How efficient it is to use— in other words, how fast can the user achieve their goals while using it

- How effective it is to use— meaning, does it provide the accuracy and complete-ness with which users achieve their goals.

- How safe it is to use— does it prevent users from making errors, and if they do, does it allow them to recover easily?

Thus, an important step to start with is to identify the various potential users and their use cases for the tool in order to design and build it around them. I anticipate that there will be various user segments that will find the software tools developed useful. The first natural group that emerges are consultants given the variety and complexity of the problems they tackle. Such tools will enable them to brainstorm ideas on how to help their clients effectively who are seeking their skills and expertise to solve problems and innovate. Another group that I expect would find it useful are the different kinds of organizations or groups within companies or non-profits who seek to solve complex problems internally or drive new innovations to the market— we will call this group managers. I anticipate the tool would enable them to follow a structured problem-solving framework that fosters collective intelligence systems and brainstorm innovative ideas for superminds within their organizations. In reality, I believe the tool would be useful to a wide range of user types given the applicability of the supermind methodology as a design approach to solving complex problems that require collective intelligence. However, for the sake of simplicity, I have focused the design process on consultants and managers as the primary user groups to design for. Accordingly, after engaging with members of the MIT Center for Collective In-telligence, I ran user research interviews with four representative individuals from our user types (two consultants and two managers). The goal of the user research sessions was to engage with and observe our target users to understand their needs, behaviors, and pain-points in relation to designing collective intelligent groups and organizations. The user research followed a qualitative approach that is concerned with what users think and feel. In particular, I sought to identify their problems, reasons, and motivations. As a result, the goal is to put my design assumptions for the tool into context and gain a better understanding of the problems to solve for our users with their needs in mind.

User 1: Aditya (pseudonym), Male, Age 25, Management Consultant, Focuses on biotech and pharmaceutical

Aditya works as an associate at a management consulting firm. In the past his client engagement covered a wide range of industries from textile to consumer goods. However, lately he began to specialize in healthcare consulting, helping clients improve their manufacturing efficiency and examining their R&D, profits, and organizational structure. When he is not interviewing clients and collecting data, he is constantly in meetings with his teammates organizing their discovery and brainstorming recom-mendations to address the client’s challenges. Aditya and his teammates usually rely on predetermined business frameworks to drive their problem solving. When pre-sented with the superminds design methodology and the possibility of a design tool, he expressed enthusiasm. He indicated that adding a new framework to their toolkit, which focuses on harnessing collective intelligence systems within their client’s orga-nization, would be particularly interesting to compare how it drives their solutioning. Aditya went on to describe what features he would like to see in the design tools which we will describe and analyze in the needs analysis section.

User 2: Sarah (pseudonym), Female, Age 34, VP of Product at a SaaS Company, Sarah leads a 10-person team at a SaaS startup. As a VP of product, her role is centered around devising and delivering the product roadmap of the company and building internal alignment, among many other responsibilities. Essentially, she ensures that the team is building products and features that customers want and would pay for. As is the case with any growing startup, there is no shortage of work that needs to be done. Thus, she has to ruthlessly prioritize and deal with uncertainties. At the moment, Sarah struggles with setting up a strong product vision for the company for the next two to three years. As they continue building products and features, having a unified messaging and product strategy will help the company better position itself in the market and attract more customers. In addition, as the company grows in size, she recognizes that more processes need to be put in place to ensure that teams can work cohesively in a frictionless way. When thinking

thinks that the supermind methodology could be a useful design exercise to apply with her team to brainstorm ways of structuring knowledge and information flow in the organization in a way that fosters the cognitive processes of superminds and the collective intelligence of the company.

3.1.2 Persona and Needs Analysis

To better empathize with our user throughout the design and implementation, I created a user persona that we will name Jasmine.

Jasmine is in her mid-30s and works as an organizational psychologist for a design consultancy firm in Austin, TX. Her role enables her to work cross-functionally with many teams across the firm. In particular, she focuses on:

• Increasing business efficiency and knowledge sharing and learning across the firm

• Coaching and motivating employees to drive their overall satisfaction and hap-piness

• Applying her human behavior and psychology expertise to the workplace to solve issues

• Assisting the management team in ensuring that the firm’s culture and values are never compromised.

Jasmine uses design thinking and agile methods to drive her problem-solving and project management. Recently, she became particularly interested in the concept of collective intelligence and how it applies to her work within the firm, and can help the company deliver more value to its clients. Jasmine hopes that the Supermind Design Tool and Library would make the methodology accessible, and allow her to design transformational projects that drive innovation, and improve the firm’s performance and culture.

• Follow a structured problem-solving and design approach using the methodol-ogy, so that she is able to use it effectively

• Learn about case studies and example of superminds, so that she is inspired to apply them to her firm

• Be intuitive and easy to use with a reasonable learning curve, so that she is able to start using it immediately and not waste time

• Enable her to save her brainstorming on a user account, so that she’s able to keep track of her work to edit it or review it

• Allow brainstorming to be visual, maybe in a mindmap of sorts, so that it is easier for her to follow and explore her chain of thoughts

• Allow her to export her brainstorming into other forms, so that she is able to share it easily with teammates

All these user stories of Jasmine would be essential in guiding the design and implementation goals of the software tools.

3.2 Supermind Design Library

3.2.1 Goals

The vision for the Supermind Design Library is to serve as an extensive knowledge base for organizational design, collective intelligence systems, business processes, case studies, and other relevant resources to designing superminds. It includes systematic methodologies for helping managers, business consultants, and others design more innovative organizations. Essentially, the library aims to provide a centralized and growing knowledge base for Jasmine to use as a reference as she seeks innovative ideas on how to harness collective intelligence within her organizations and solve problems. Building on previous work on the Process Handbook [2], the library aims to

intro-how to organize different kinds of groups (Hierarchies, Democracies, Markets, Com-munities, Ecosystems), classify business processes and activities by the supermind design conceptual moves that could generate them (Fig 1-2), or by the superminds’ cognitive processes (Decide, Create, Sense, Remember, and Learn). These taxonomies at various levels of abstraction introduce a new framework for how to think about process and organization design knowledge management. While a significant portion of the knowledge base will be curated by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, I expect the majority of its content would be user generated. With that being said, our hope is that this will not compromise the quality of the content and would enable the library to provide a wealth of knowledge that is relevant and continuously growing.

3.2.2 Specifications and Prototypes

Considering Jasmine’s user stories and the Supermind Design Library goals, the soft-ware would be a content management system that hosts the knowledge base. In particular, such a system should manage the creation and modification of the digital content and provide an intuitive and easy browsing experience for Jasmine. Thus, I define its specifications as follows:

Objectives Features Jasmine is able to look up content of

interest that is useful, relevant, and

in-spires supermind ideas • Make the content in the knowl-edge base indexable

• Provide search features to look up and discover content

Jasmine and other users are able to contribute to the knowledge base

• Define guideline for content cre-ation and publishing

• Create a user interface for con-tent editing and submission • Include user generated ideas as

part of the knowledge base

The knowledge base is organized in an intuitive format that is easy for

Jas-mine to understand and navigate • Structure the data into tax-onomies in the database en-abling easy retrieval and manip-ulation

• Introduce a search feature that enables users to filter content based on these taxonomies • Provide flexible browsing

expe-rience using multiple filters such: user generated, editor generated, industry related content, etc.

The content of the knowledge base should be helpful to Jasmine as she uses the supermind design tool to brainstorm ideas

• Add a REST API which enables the design tool to interact with the Library

Table 3.1: Specifications of the supermind design library

3.3 Supermind Design Tool

3.3.1 Goals

For Jasmine, I expect the design tool to become an essential piece of software in her toolkit that she relies on in her frequent problem-solving and design flow. In partic-ular, the tool seeks to make the supermind design methodology accessible and assist users in achieving their goals of generating novel ideas on how to configure collective intelligent systems and human-computer groups. By relying on the conceptual moves and the knowledge base and its taxonomies, the tool will provide software functional-ities that aim to streamline the design activity and apply the supermind methodology effectively. The integration between the library’s knowledge base and the design tool would empower Jasmine to expand the scope of her design by exploring the many possible ways a task could be done and supermind configurations.

3.3.2 Specifications and Prototypes

Objectives Features Enable Jasmine to intuitively apply

the design methodology to a problem

• Provide a field in the UI for the user to define the problem and provide relevant details

• Add a field for the user to type ideas they come up with and the conceptual moves used

Enable Jasmine to take advantage of the knowledge base as she brainstorms

in the design tool • Enable a recommendation fea-ture that suggests content from the library that is relevant to the problem and the generated ideas • Enable users to add the sug-gested content to their brain-storming output

• Allow users to access the sug-gested content on the library from the design tool

Enable Jasmine to keep track of her work

• Enable users to create a personal account on the design tool • Enable users to save their work

and access it at a late time to edit it or review it

• Enable users to see a history of the design exercises they run and delete any if they wish

Enable Jasmine to share her work and store in different mediums

• Enables users to export their work to other file formats

Table 3.2: Specifications of the supermind design tool

3.4 Prioritization, Storyboard, Analysis

3.4.1 Value vs. Complexity

As is the case with any software system design and development project, ruthless prioritization is an essential practice. This step ensures features are being carefully considered which helps manage the requirements and resources. Thus, in order to prioritize the development of the software functionalities highlighted in section 3.3.2 and 3.2.2, I rely on the value vs. complexity framework. In particular, this process seeks to evaluate the features based on the value it anticipates to deliver to the end user against the amount of effort the implementation would require. The goal of this exercise is to visually place the features on a prioritization matrix and choose

the ones that deliver the highest value and require the least effort. This method performs well when working on a new product, building a minimum viable product, or when development resources are scarce. This will guide the scope of the software tool implementation towards building minimum features that drive the most value for Jasmine.

Below, I prioritize the features for each of the Supermind Library and the design tool based on my impression of the technical difficulty of implementation and user research. In particular, features with the same sticky note color indicate features that share the same user objective.

Design Library

Figure 3-1: Value vs. complexity prioritization for the design library

Therefore, from the prioritization, it appears that most of the features deliver near-high value to the user with low to medium complexity. This version of the tool serves as a functional minimum viable product (MVP). By definition, an MVP represents the version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum

said, I would deprioritize the features below for this MVP with the goal of including them in the next iteration and testing of the tools:

• Enable flexible browsing experience using multiple filters such as: user generated ideas, editor generated ideas, industry related content

• Determine an editorial process guideline for content creation both for curated and user generated content

• A user interface for content editing and submission. Design Tool

Figure 3-2: Value vs. complexity prioritization for the design tool

Similarly for the design tool MVP, I plan to deprioritize the features below towards the next iteration of the tool:

• User can create a personal account on the design tool • User can export their brainstorming into other file formats

3.4.2 Storyboard and Analysis

In this section, I focus on storyboard design and analysis of the supermind design tool. As the objectives and features become clearer for the software tools, creating a storyboard is an essential step to understanding how all the features come together to create a user experience that delights Jasmine and meets her user goals. The storyboard serves as a visual representation of how the user would interact with the design tool and communicate the primary design ideas to be implemented. This allows the storyboard to focus on problems and user goals rather than features and software functionalities. Thus, after a deep consideration of different user interfaces and interactions, below is a low fidelity interface of the design tool:

Figure 3-3: UI wireframe I of the design Tool

The UI enables the user to apply the methodology and meets the different user features prioritized. In particular, starting with Section (1), Jasmine begins with typing the problem she is interested in solving and adding a description of the problem and any other relevant details. Afterward she can immediately begin generating ideas in Section (2). The brainstorming section mimics how an outline behaves on many

text box represents an idea generated. When Jasmine presses RETURN, a new box is created right below, where she can type her next idea. When she presses TAB, the idea box gets indented as she branches out to explore related ideas. Conversely, she can press SHIFT+TAB to undo an indentation or delete a text box if it is empty using the DELETE key. As Jasmine types her generated idea, Section (3) will display relevant suggested ideas from the design library.

Figure 3-4: UI wireframe II of the design Tool

Jasmine is able to save her work or create a new brainstorming board using the buttons on item 4. She can access her saved boards at any time in saved boards in item 5. The suggested ideas section shows a list of ideas (item 8) that are relevant to one of the ideas that Jasmine generated. In particular, she can click on the icon in item 9which would take her to the idea’s corresponding entry on the library to read more details about it and explore related content. In addition, the suggested ideas can be filtered to show both curated content (Editor generated) and user generated ideas, or either, using the filters in item 10.

Going back to brainstorming, Jasmine can use the supermind conceptual moves by click on the drop-down in item 6 shown in the UI below.

Figure 3-5: UI wireframe III of the design Tool

Once Jasmine selects a move, let’s say ‘Analogize’, an empty field box tagged with the move name pops up right below.

Figure 3-6: UI wireframe IV of the design Tool

Once Jasmine types her idea in the empty box, she can simply click on any of the suggested ideas to add it to her brainstorming flow right below.

Chapter 4

Implementation

4.1 Technical Design and Technology Stack

Both the MVP of the design tool and library were developed as web applications. In this section I present the main technologies used, the data model, and the engineering decisions that went into the technical design.

The Supermind Design Library is a web application built using WordPress. It is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP and paired with a MySQL database. I chose WordPress for its excellent simplicity of use and flexibility which provides a wide toolkit of features that are ready to use out of the box and meet the system goals. In addition, in the long run, the library will be maintained by a group of editors and content creators who may or may not have the technical skills to actively maintain a website built from scratch. In particular, the system provides built-in user role management and can handle different media types which would facilitate the content creation for both editors’ and users’ generated ones. The library site can run on any Apache-MySQL-PHP web server which is provided by most web hosting services.

The supermind design tool was built using React, an open-source JavaScript li-brary for building user interfaces. It was chosen for building the UI given its simplicity and scalability in building single-page applications, which is what the design tool is,

enables web applications to change the data without reloading the page which meets the use case of the suggested ideas feature. On the backend, the design tool is able to retrieve suggested ideas and save the history of the user by connecting to the library’s database through a REST API. When it comes to providing suggested ideas to the user, the app relies on a search engine that queries the database where the knowledge base content is organized in taxonomies and indexed. The React App is compiled into a bundle of HTML and JavaScript files that can run either locally or to be hosted on any web server.

4.2 Data Models

When it comes to the nature of the information the system needs to manage, there are primarily three types: user history, knowledge base entries, indices of the con-tent. We rely on MySQL to manage the data, an open-source relational database management system. I present a simplified form of the data model that is used to handle the information. The main tables that the system has are USER_HISTORY, POSTS, SEARCH_DATASET, SEARCH_INDEX. Their columns and function are summarized in the table below:

Table Name Column Goal

USER_HISTORY It contains information about the board including: - ’board_id’ - ’problem’ - ’description’ - ’ideas_generated’ - ’time_created’ - ’time_edited’

Currently, the system handles the use case of only one user in which their previous boards gets stored in this table

POSTS The columns include the content of the knowledge base and infor-mation about: - ’post_author’ - ’post_date’ - ’post_content’ - ’post_title’ - ’post_status’ - ’post_type’

- Post parent and taxonomies

This serves as the mas-ter table for the knowl-edge base maintaining its content and taxonomies.

SEARCH_DATASET The table maintains information about the tokenized content in the knowledge base used to suggest ideas in the design tool. It in-cludes::

- ID - Type - Data - reindex

This contains the data that powers the suggested ideas feature in the design tool.

SEARCH_INDEX It contains associated scores of the data in SEARCH_DATASET ta-ble including:

- ID - Word - type - score

This large indexing of the search dataset en-sures the relevancy of the suggested ideas from the knowledge base.

There are other tables in the database that contain important metadata for the knowledge base, search dataset and users. These tables are not directly used by the software system, but they are helpful in gathering historical data about it and maintaining its integrity. In addition, the initial content in the design library for the MVP was obtained from the MIT Process Handbook databases.

4.3 Final User Interfaces

I present below the final user interfaces of the web application.

4.3.1 Supermind Design Library

Figure 4-1: Home page of the web application

Figure 4-2: Explore page of the supermind design library

Figure 4-4: Example of a search performed in the library

Figure 4-6: An example of a user generating ideas and applying the methodology

Chapter 5

Extensions and Future work

This project has the potential to evolve into a commercial or open-source product that consultants, managers, designers, and others can rely on to ideate and use collective intelligence to solve problems. The first natural step for the tools developed is to go through usability and user testing, specifically, summative and formative user testing. The goal is to validate the applications’ usability and identify any design and user experience issues and gather insight on how to improve it. The outcome of the testing would allow us to determine the success rate of users in achieving their goals and the time spent completing different tasks. With that being said, my ideas for improvement and future work fall in three directions: technical improvement, adoption, and cognitive psychology research.

On the technical side, there are multiple improvements that will need to be made to the backend infrastructure to better support the knowledge base and the tools as they scale. The goal is to improve the structure of the taxonomies in the database to enable the knowledge base to provide better suggested content in the design tool. In addition to adding a user account management system, we believe that enabling users to collaboratively share and edit boards using operational transformation would allow them to work effectively together. Lastly, we aim to enable users to export their work into different file formats. Thus, users would be able to integrate their brainstorming boards into different workflows and share it through different channels.

As is the case with any digital product, driving adoption is a key step into vali-dating the user need and the value the design tools and library provide. In particular, we aim to begin by improving the learnability of the tools by creating in-product tips and walkthroughs. In addition, assembling a beta group testing would allow us to refine the user experience and see how the software tools perform under real-world usage scenarios in terms of their reliability, performance, and scalability. Lastly, we aim to enable users to contribute content to the design library which would draw diverse content from different fields and topics and ultimately providing more utility to users when thinking about designing superminds.

Finally, the supermind design tool and library have the potential to provide valu-able insights into how humans ideate and construct mental processes. In particular, being able to collect various data about how the methodology and the conceptual moves are used would provide unique observations into the cognitive patterns and modeling our brains, consciously or unconsciously, follow. We are excited about the potential of data we would be able to collect and the valuable insights we can draw from it.

Chapter 6

Conclusion

In this thesis, I presented a CAD tool and a knowledge base for designing super-minds. The software tools enable users interested in utilizing collective intelligence to apply the supermind methodology in their ideation and design process. In par-ticular, the design library provides an extensive knowledge base for organizational design, business activities, and processes. It relies on systematic taxonomies to or-ganize its content and introduces a new framework of how to think about process and knowledge management in organizational design. This library supercharges the design tool to allow users to generate novel ideas on how to configure superminds. By relying on the conceptual moves and the knowledge base and its taxonomies, the tool provides software functionalities that streamlines the design activity and applies the supermind methodology effectively.

Throughout the design and implementation, I adopted a user-centered design approach that places the needs and goals of the user at the forefront of the process. This informed the software features and the overall user experience. The primary design goals prioritized were simplicity and efficiency. This manifested through the simple material design of the UI, and a focus on feature discoverability and usability. This project laid the groundwork for an MVP for the supermind methodology design tools to help drive user testing and validation. My hope is that the superminds design tool and library would make the methodology accessible, and allow users to design transformational projects that drive innovation and harnesses collective intelligence

Bibliography

[1] Malone, T. W., Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together. New York: Little Brown, 2018.

[2] Malone, T. W., Crowston, K. G., & Herman, G. (Eds.) Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

[3] Where Kiva Works. Kiva. Accessed June 18, 2020. https://www.kiva.org/about/where-kiva-works.

[4] Malone, Thomas W. Supermind Design Primer, 2020.

[5] Dickson, K. E. (2020, February 13). Sierra Leone’s latest Maternal Death and

Surveillance Report (MDSR). Retrieved from https://sierraleone.unfpa.org/en/news/sierra- leone%E2%80%99s-latest-maternal-death-and-surveillance-report-mdsr-released-today-launch

[6] NVSS - Maternal Mortality - Homepage. (2019, November 20). Retrieved June 18, 2020, from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/maternal-mortality/

[7] Tushman, Michael & Lakhani, Karim & Lifshitz-Assaf, Hila. (2012). Open

Inno-vation and Organization Design. Journal of Organization Design. 1. 10.7146/jod.1.1.6336. [8] Ries, E., The lean startup: How constant innovation creates radically successful