Kyriakou et al. (2021)

Theory on Search

• Landscape is an abstract territory in which design search takes place (Baldwin et al. 2006).
• Landscape is an environment in which problem solving takes place through search.
• Search is a process of process of exploring a space (Majchrzak and Malhotra 2019; March and Simon 1958; Simon 1996).
• Landscape has a large number of artifacts. Each artifact is a single point in the landscape (Baldwin and Clark 2000; Bell and Newell 1971; Murmann and Frenken 2006).
• When seekers search the landscape, the landscape gets “mapped”, which means the seekers are in the process of understanding the properties of a large number of design alternatives (Baldwin et al. 2006; Lee and Butler 2019).
• A general consensus among search researchers is that seekers search the design landscape before either selecting an existing solution or proposing a new solution (Brunswicker et al. 2018; Levinthal 1997; Simon 1978)
• The existence of novel artifacts in the design landscape also depends on the actions of participants. Therefore, actions associated with prosumption — how participants decide which designs to create and use — sculpt the design landscape.
• These relations help participants “represent differences between the desired and the present” (Visser 2006).
• Just as the structure of physical landscapes constrains and encourages certain physical explorations (Davies 1992), the structure of design landscapes will encourage or discourage certain design explorations that lead to the creation of novel artifacts (cf. design as exploration, Gero 1998; Logan and Smithers 1993; Navinchandra 2012).

Theory on Visual

• By contrast, the ontology of visual information is not well-articulated in practice. For example, there is less ontological agreement about differences between two shapes than differences between two functional uses of a design. This lack of visual ontological structure makes findings gaps difficult since the definition of a gap is not clear, such as whether a shape which shares some attributes of another shape is novel or not.

• Moreover, visual search is performed configurationally, and can proceed bottom-up as well as top-down (Bruce and Tsotso, 2009). Finally, searching for visual information is accomplished differently from searching for verbal information. Visual stimuli are more readily skimmed as they accelerate the translation between different perceptual modalities (Gonçalves et al. 2012; Malaga 2000), in contrast to verbal information which is processed linearly. Consequently, any structure accorded visual attributes may help the searcher in identifying gaps. For example, if the existing designs in a

Theory on Relational Novelty

• A search for gaps makes the search a relational one; gaps are not found by looking at one artifact but by understanding how artifacts differ from one another.
• By relational, we refer to relations between artifacts which yield a measure — for example dissimilarity
• An exemplar of the relational view comes from McKinney Jr and Yoos (2010), who offered a distinction in how information is examined by identifying the “token view” and the “syntax view.” The token view is one in which people are assumed to evaluate a piece of information about an individual artifact, not for its relational characteristics to other artifacts, but for the artifact itself. In contrast is what they call the syntax view, which focuses on “the measurable relationship between tokens that reduces entropy” (p.332). McKinney Jr and Yoos (2010) found only two out of sixty information systems papers that took the syntax view, while the remainder took the token view.

Theory on Novelty

• The relational view is consistent with how novelty has been defined in most studies, where an artifact is considered as novel when it is more rare, unusual, or uncommon in relation to existing artifacts in the design landscape (Connolly et al. 1993; Dennis et al. 2013; MacCrimmon and Wagner 1994). Novel artifacts tend to provide superior value (Brown and Eisenhardt 1995), have been repeatedly demonstrated to be stimulating and capturing the attention of people (Hirschman 1980; Schweizer 2006), and have higher economic value (Kaplan and Vakili 2014).

Theory on Historical Novelty and Psychological Novelty

• Assessing novelty in this relational manner has been examined in the literature in two different ways.
• In the first way, the novelty of an artifact is judged in relation to how uncommon it is in the mind of the rater, known as psychological novelty (Boden 2009). However, such an assessment is difficult to compare between raters (Criscuolo et al. 2017; Danneels and Kleinschmidt 2001; Garcia and Calantone 2002; Huy and Vuori 2015) because of their different experiences (von Hippel 1986).
• In the second way, the novelty of an artifact is judged by how uncommon the artifact is in the overall population of preexisting artifacts (Dean et al. 2006) — a time-dependent concept referred to as historical novelty (Boden 2009). Since, in the context of OICs, the novelty of an artifact refers to the extent that the artifact has not been expressed before at that point in time (Kankanhalli et al. 2005; Magnusson et al. 2003), we focus on historical novelty, viewing it as a relational, time-dependent concept (North 2013).

Use of verbal and visual information

• Past literature distinguishes between two attributes of artifacts that are likely to inform participants. The first describes the visual nature of the design, such as the pictures, sketches, shapes, and sizes depicted in the design.
• The second describes the verbal nature of the design, such as textually-based design descriptions explaining the purpose, function, and meaning of the design (Mayer and Sims 1994; Paivio 1991).
• Participants attend differently — and independently — to these two types of information (Sadoski and Paivio 2013). Visual information is processed in parallel, sensory, visceral, holistic fashion. That is, when viewing a design, the individual is likely to see a complete image and formulate a holistic sensory perspective of it, such as “a jumping candle” or “a flying car.”
• In contrast, verbal information is processed sequentially as words are presented, activating an associative structure. That is, when reading about the intended functional use of a design, the individual is likely to formulate a series of associations such as “the car will be useful to reduce commutes between cities, but create a commuter mess within a city” (Mayer and Sims 1994; Paivio 1991). Therefore, in understanding how search occurs within a design landscape, the verbal and visual attributes of the designs are likely to be used differently.

Theory of Design Landscape Structures as Antecedents of Novelty

• Participants in OICs searching to create novel designs are likely to act similarly to market innovators (Alexander 1997; Potts 2012; White 1981), looking for gaps in the existing design landscape.

• How these gaps can be identified and depicted has been the subject of much research related to ontology, organization, and structure (Burton-Jones et al. 2005; Johnson et al. 2015

• The structure of a design landscape can be defined via categorizations that depict relations between artifacts or participants’ conceptualizations (Malerba 2007; Potts 2012; White 1981).

• That is, categorization schemes indicate the extent to which participants and their designs are similar on some information dimension (Simon 1962). These categorizations can reduce search costs because designs with similar characteristics can be identified (Chan et al. 2018; Porac and Thomas 1990). Since creators are looking for opportunities and gaps for novelty, categorization can help them identify the gaps more easily.

• Prior literature on innovation has also suggested that a lack of structure motivates participants to create novel designs, because a lack of structure indicates an immature market, attracting entrants with novel designs (Malerba 2007; White 1981)

• Thus, for visual information, structure is likely to help indicate the presence of gaps for novel insertion.

Effects of Verbal and Visual Novelty

• We have previously argued that artifacts are more likely to be used by participants when they are novel (Arentze and Timmermans 2005; Hirschman 1980; Schweizer 2006).

• We have also distinguished between two different forms of novelty based on their informational dimensions: artifacts which are verbally novel, and artifacts which are visually novel.

• Verbal search is likely to be exploiting an ontology, while visual search is likely to exploit sensory associations.

• Verbal search is likely to be exploiting an ontology, while visual search is likely to exploit sensory associations. We now address the question of how participants find verbally novel artifacts and visually novel artifacts as they search the design landscape.

Theory on Relative Strength of Visual and Verbal Novelty  

• Faulkner and Runde (2009) suggest that, while visual depictions represent the physical form of an artifact, verbal descriptions present the social function of an artifact, an thus descriptions will have a greater influence than visual depictions on presumption
• Because verbal terms can be easily combined, verbal novelty may be easier to locate through such combinations, helping participants search for novel designs. Finally, participants may be more confident in a design found through sophisticated search engines using verbal information, knowing that the search engine is examining the entirety of the corpus (Purcell et al. 2012).
• In contrast to the value of verbal information in conducting searches for novel designs, visual novelty is assessed through an incomplete, idiosyncratic, and manual search of designs, and consequently is unlikely to instill such a level of confidence. Therefore, we expect that visual novelty will have a smaller, albeit still significant influence on a participant’s decision to prosume an artifact.

Research Question: How do the relations between artifacts affect the production and consumption of novel artifacts?

Hypothesis:

Proposition 1A: Participants will contribute less verbally novel artifacts in highly structured design landscapes.

Proposition 1B: Participants will contribute more visually novel artifacts in highly structured design landscapes.

Proposition 2A: The greater an artifact’s visual novelty, the more likely that the artifact will be prosumed.

Proposition 2B: The greater an artifact’s verbal novelty, the more likely that the artifact will be prosumed.

Proposition 3: Verbal novelty will have a stronger effect on artifact prosumption than visual novelty.

Results:

• Visual and verbal novelty of an artifact have distinct effects on consumption and production. Structure of the relations — the degree to which artifacts are organized.

• High degrees of both visual and verbal novelty were prosumed less than designs that don’t exhibit high degrees of both types of novelty.

• Visually novel artifacts are more likely to be produced in more-structured landscapes, while verbally novel artifacts are more likely to be produced in less-structured landscapes.

• Both visual and verbal novelty had a positive effect on prosumption (P2), while verbal novelty had a higher effect on prosumption than visual novelty (P3).

• Visual structure had a positive effect on visual novelty.

• As visual information is inherently less organized, we theorized and found empirical evidence that any visual structure will help to identify gaps.

• Novelty in terms of verbal information has a stronger effect on prosumption than novelty in terms of visual information.

• Consumption and production are lower when the artifact is both more visually and verbally novel than other artifacts in the landscape.

• Consumers and producers are influenced not only by their individual backgrounds and the attributes of the artifacts, but by the relational distribution of the artifacts throughout the landscape.

Discussion:

• future researchers to reconsider describing digital artifacts simply as “novel” since we found such distinctive differences between the prosumption of artifacts that are highly novel visually, highly novel verbally, and highly novel both visually and verbally.

• how contribution and consumption are often so interrelated in OICs that research examining one or the other may not be fully describing