Contestant Centered Design: creative approaches to designing competitions

Creativity is critical to solving complex problems, developing new strategies, facilitating innovation, and driving organizational change. NIST’s Public Safety Communications Research Division’s open innovation efforts focuses on advancing wireless communications for America’s first responders by leveraging expertise and innovative solutions through crowdsourcing and collaboration. Success relies on creating competitions that achieve NIST’s organizational goals, incentivize world class science, remove barriers to entry, and maximize participation. Not an easy equation to balance.

This session will discuss how design tradeoffs are considered for a variety of competition elements as concepts develop into a competition and as competitions are implemented. The goal of this interactive session is to provide a behind-the-scenes view of our process, engage audience ideas, and dive into a discussion about crowdsourcing and contestant-centered design.