Milestone 1: Proposal and Ideation

Overview

You are to propose a problem and an approach that will 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.

Milestone Assignments

The assignments contributing to this milestone are:

• Assignment 1.1: Individual Brainstorm
  • Due: Thursday, January 9, 11:59pm
• Assignment 1.2: Group Proposals
  • Due: Monday, January 13, 11:59pm
• Assignment 1.3: Finalized Proposal
  • Due: Wednesday, January 15, 11:59pm
• Assignment 1.4: Design Ideation
  • Due: Saturday, January 18, 11:59pm
• Milestone 1 Report
  • Due: Tuesday, January 21, 11:59pm

Project Theme

The theme for projects in this course this year is fostering connections and community health, focusing on connecting people through interactive displays and enabling them to collaboratively tackle a problem or interest.

The overall goal of your group project should be to support healthy communities by enabling connections among people who you believe would benefit from knowing each other or who could achieve something great together. The communities could be created or supported among people who are at UW, people who live in the same neighborhood, go to the same grocery store or sports club, or people who are interested in politics, history, chess… the choice of a target group is yours! That said, try not to design for yourselves or people like you, and try to choose a target group that you can talk to and/or observe either remotely or in person.

Examples of technical interventions to support these communities are interactive displays enabling communication across buildings, the internet, or the street. Importantly, we are looking for interesting approaches that engage people as serendipitously as possible, such as by providing ways to view and interact with others on the way to university, work, or the grocery store, and avoiding that someone has to hear about, download, and install an app before connections can be made.