Assignment 1: Project Proposal

Overview

You are to propose a problem and an approach that could form the basis of a project for this course. Successful projects will observe the need for good human-centered design in an interactive computing system, analyze the needs and opportunities in the problem, explore potential designs, and propose a compelling solution.

This assignment is worth 3% of your overall course grade:

  • 0.5% for the proposal brainstorm
  • 2.5% for the project proposal

Milestones

This is an individual assignment, consisting of three milestones.

Project Description

The theme for projects in this course is personal informatics:

Personal informatics systems are systems that help people collect personally relevant information for the purpose of self-reflection and gaining self-knowledge.

Li et al., 2010.

Personal informatics relates heavily to the Quantified Self movement, which emphasizes:

Self-knowledge through numbers.

Gary Wolf, 2009

Current widely used examples of personal informatics systems exist in a variety of domains, with more active or passive approaches:

  • Finances
    • Mint (for tracking finances)
  • Health and Wellness
  • Media
    • Last.fm (for tracking music listening)
  • Physical Activity

Individuals have gone much deeper into their own data:

  • Feltron Report (a designer who tracks everything he does and releases an annual report)

Researchers have also studied current processes, challenges, and opportunities:

Thinking Big

Your proposal must go beyond a technology-centric proposal of a webpage, phone application, or interaction. Think about the problems that people face in their lives, how we can approach those problems, and the role for interactive computing. This first assignment is your opportunity to think broadly about identifying a problem. Subsequent assignments will provide opportunities to focus on designing a specific technological solution to a specific set of tasks.

You should identify and consider goals and activities that are important to people. Potential domains include:

  • living a healthy life
  • managing finances effectively
  • managing time effectively
  • reducing environmental impact

Activities within personal informatics can include:

  • planning to track
  • helping remember to track
  • the actual act of tracking
  • identifying activity patterns
  • sharing accomplishments with friends and family
  • abandoning tracking

Do not start with a focus on concrete one-time tasks (e.g., logging into your bank account). Instead identify problems in long-lived activities that span many different social or technological contexts. If you want to help people manage their money, do not immediately propose a website that addresses one specific task. Consider the range of other opportunities (e.g., personal mobile devices, shared family computers, point of sale systems).

Focus on creating or improving a specific application or service that addresses the issues of an actual community. You must be able to create and evaluate a design within the timeframe of this course, so consider whether you can reasonably gain access to the necessary people. We encourage you to think big, expanding upon your application to include new ideas for interaction techniques or technology platforms.

Do not feel constrained by current devices, but instead aim to explore an exciting design that could potentially motivate the development of new enabling technology. For example, see how Artefact presents the Dialog concept:

This design has not been implemented, and might not even be immediately possible. But it has been developed in substantial detail, understanding implications for design and implementation.

Going Forward

The course staff will select a subset of submitted proposals for sponsorship. Sponsored proposals will be posted, and students will then bid on the projects they want to pursue in this course. Your proposal is thus an effort to convince both the staff and your classmates that a problem is interesting, tractable within the timeline and constraints of this course, and worthy of investigation.

Deliverables

1a: Project Brainstorm

Due: Uploaded the night before section Friday, October 2, 2015

Friday’s section will focus on brainstorming potential project directions. You will get started on thinking, and help seed this brainstorming, with some individual ideas.

Propose three starting points for brainstorming domains, problems, and goals that might be supported via self-tracking.

By domain, we mean an aspect of life. Domains that are already common in self-tracking include:

  • finances (e.g., tracking investments, spending)
  • wellness (e.g., tracking physical activity, sleep, weight)
  • health (e.g., tracking for post-surgical pain management, allergies or other personal triggers, major weight loss)
  • mood (e.g., tracking mood, identifying depressive symptoms)

Be sure to focus on problems and goals, not potential design solutions. One way to help yourself identify a hierarchy of problems and goals is to ask “why?”. For example:

  • Why is a person using Mint?
  • Why is a person tracking their spending?
  • Why do they want to know how much they spend on leisure activities?
  • Why do they have a goal of saving for a major purchase?

Each idea should be a single sentence, identifying the domain and the problem or goal. At most one of your ideas may come from any of the domains above. You other two ideas should be from domains not in this list, in order to broaden the brainstorm. Ensure the ideas are significantly different, not small variations on the same idea.

Submission

No more than one page of text in PDF format. Submit via Canvas here:

https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/987987/assignments/3000656

If you are still attempting to add, or otherwise unable to access the submission system, submit via the instructor email address.

In section, be prepared to contribute your initial ideas as part of a larger brainstorm.

Grading

This milestone will be graded on a scale of 3 points: One point for each unique proposed idea (i.e., do not submit small variations on the same idea).

1b: Project Proposal

Due: Uploaded the night before class Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Propose and analyze a problem that form the basis of a design project for this class.

In one paragraph, describe the design problem and motivation. This description should convince the reader that this is a difficult and interesting problem, worth spending a quarter considering. State what the problem is and why it is a problem, or describe a new idea and why it will enhance an existing application or practice.

In another paragraph, analyze the problem or idea to give more background and context. Do not just focus on the negative aspects of the current situation, but also identify some positive aspects that may be beneficial to retain. A few salient examples from existing systems or practices could be used to support those claims. If appropriate, you may conduct this analysis by describing a scenario that illustrates how someone might encounter and resolve the problem.

Ensure your report is appropriately clear and easy to read. This includes:

  • text should be clear and concise
  • use section headings as appropriate
  • include images in the body of the write-up with appropriate figure numbers and captions
  • refer to the figures in the body of your text
  • check for typos, spelling, and grammar errors

Be sure your presentation looks good:

  • choose appropriate colors, fonts, and styles
  • make liberal use of whitespace

“Seeds” from UW Community

We reached out to some people in the Computer Science, Design, and HCI community at UW for “seeds” of design projects for this course. These are not intended to be complete proposals, nor are you expected to choose from them, nor is your proposal inherently more likely to be chosen for “funding” in the course if you do use one of these as a starting point. These are just intended as points that might start you thinking in a space.

These “seeds” are intentionally much shorter than your proposals. This was to ensure the “seed” leaves plenty of room for you to develop your own ideas and direction.

The responses we received are posted here:

https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/987987/discussion_topics/3039572

Examples from Prior Offerings

Examples from prior offerings include:

Submission

No more than one page of text in PDF format.

Images do not count against your page limit, and are therefore effectively free. You should embed images throughout your PDF, keeping them near the text that references them. The limit applies to the approximate amount of text you would have if all images were removed.

Submit via Canvas here:

https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/987987/assignments/3000658

Grading

This proposal will be graded on a scale of 10 points:

  1. Problem and Motivation: (3 points)
  2. Analysis of Problem: (3 points)
  3. Novelty and Creativity: (2 points)
  4. Report Clarity and Presentation: (2 points)

1c: Project Bid

Due: Submitted before class Thursday, October 8, 2015

Review the sponsored projects and course staff comments regarding those projects:

https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/987987/discussion_topics/3047301

You will submit a bid on projects and potential partners. Course staff will use your bids to assign projects and groups.

Submission

Submit your bid on projects and potential partners here:

https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/987987/quizzes/860487

Grading

Submitting a project bid is a requirement for proceeding in the class.