Digital footprints as a means to aid the understanding, monitoring, and management of open and crowd-based design paradigms

Open Design and crowd-sourced development have recently formed a new paradigm in the engineering design and manufacture industries. Through collaboration and free sharing of information, open design has proven capable of developing complex products at a low cost, utilising an expert and motivated work force to bring products to market. However, as open design differs greatly from traditional engineering enterprise in several ways, there are challenges in its effective utilisation. This paper proposes an approach (termed engineering project health monitoring) to addressing two challenges; automatically generating a shared understanding of project-specific information, and providing the means to aid workflow management in the open design situation. As open design is often performed through distributed individual working, and is often subject to little management structure, aiding the generation of a shared understanding and control of activity scheduling and prioritisation are vital to ensuring a high-performing output.