Designing human-powered business solutions - what the Foldit experience teaches us
As an awesome example of a game-based science crowdsourcing project, the Foldit project in itself deserves special mention. They demonstrated that humans still have the edge on pure computing crunching power when it comes to solving complex problems.
However, I'm particularly interested what the project also reveals about the dynamic of involving 'normal' human players in this problem solving. Andrew McAfee provides an excellent summary:
- We are particularly strong at spatial reasoning, or literally seeing solutions.
- We have intuition.
- We have great adaptivity - McAfee notes that "technologies like wikis are a big step forward in facilitating collaboration within geographically dispersed groups."
- While collaborating, we exercise a high degree of self-organization (incidentally, we've since this before in immersive gaming - transitory leadership).
- We love competition.
This is all particularly relevant when we think about why and how we should apply Social Business Design thinking to problems faced by organisations.


