Crowdsourcing and Participatory Mechanisms in Crowdfunded Design Projects

This research investigates the convergence of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding practices to affect co-design activities between project founders and user-investors through reward-based crowdfunding. To that end, it examines successful design-centered projects on Kickstarter in order to firstly establish five ‘participatory mechanisms’ for defining and discussing participatory practice in the crowdfunding context, and subsequently quantifying the prevalence of such mechanisms and correlating them to other project variables. We find that projects’ context and proposed outcomes are significantly related to participation, which was most often observed in the Technology and Games categories, and in software and hardware projects. We find the implementation of participatory mechanisms to be tied to project scope, in terms of fundraising goals, funds raised, number of backers, and communication between founders and the crowd.