Design 21: Social Design Network

Daren C. Brabham is a Ph.D. candidate and graduate teaching fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. Additionally, he is an associate graduate researcher with the Lab for Communicating Complexity with Multimedia, directed by Prof. Ron Yaros in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland-College Park. He has a B.A. in communication and religion from Trinity University (Texas) and an M.S. in communication from the University of Utah.

He has taught nine different college courses in speech and mass communication as the instructor of record and has given more than 20 guest class lectures on new media, public relations, and gender and sexuality.

His dissertation, "Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: Leveraging the Collective Intelligence of Online Communities for Public Good," is directed by Prof. Joy Pierce. It makes a case for the online business model of crowdsourcing as an appropriate method for government and non-profit problem solving. He is among the first to publish research on the crowdsourcing model, with articles in the journals Convergence, First Monday, Planning Theory, and Flow. He is currently overseeing Next Stop Design, an experiment to test the crowdsourcing model for public participation in transit planning, funded by a grant from the U.S. Federal Transit Administration.

Professionally, he has experience in Web usability, Web design, public relations, and marketing.

And most importantly, Daren is a Texan.