• What makes a good topic
• Important to have a title early
• Chapter: Review of the Literature in Research Design
• Criteria
• Passionate (When you think about a couple topics, which one brings you the most energy?) – There’s almost always a topic that will give you a bit more energy / excitement than the others. Energy = the engine that will drive you for the rest of the year. vs. Strategy – A topic that is good for when we leave school / good to help get a job / good for me! (NOT A GOOD IDEA.)
• Access to Resources – It’s very easy to pick a topic that sounds really interesting, but you also have to stop and think about access to users, facilities, etc. (Although, lack of access doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to pull it off.)
• Specific – Pick a topic that is fairly narrow in focus. However, instead of trying to cut out pieces or really trim it down, instead try to anchor it to something in the real world. (i.e. A new type of interaction that will aid decision makers in complex situations – Study on how referees deal with stressful situations in football… How to help them make decisions during the game. “My Capstone is about coming up with a device about how to make a referee make calls.” That is the same as “a new type of interaction that will aid decision makers…” but its much more concrete and easier to get your point access.) Can you describe your Capstone to a person as a concept, and can you describe it using a real world example? Its usually easier to start by over grounding your research and then narrow as you progress.



• Creative / Original – Design Capstone vs. Research Capstone. How does this relate to theory?
Ideal Types:
• Research: Should contribute to theory in some way (maybe change / critique / add / etc.) Will still include some design work.
• Design: Should be about the design, but impossible to just “design” without doing the research.
• Pretty impossible to actually define what a “good, creative and original design” is.
• Sometimes, taking something that already exists and redesigning it, making it better some way, not only is that more challenging, but it could be both better and more rewarding. It might very well generate more interest.
• Subscribe to IxD!
• Users – Thinking about how the users are will really help!
• Client: The person or group who hires you as a designer.
• User: The people who will actually use whatever you are making.
• Very different groups (although sometimes its the same person / group.
• Surrogate clients / users = when you try to design for a particular group of people that aren’t available, you try to come up with a group that you can use as a substitute.
• The Common Good – not designing for anyone specific, you’re actually designing to make the world a better place.
• Ability / Competence – Make sure you have something that you can really do. Not that its impossible to do something that you’ve never done before, but you want to make sure that if you don’t personally have the ability, the people you will be working with do. (so perhaps not an AI driven rowboat to make the lives of fishermen easier.)
• Time / Resources – More Later from Marty!

Question: How important is present technology / availability important?

• Important in the sense that it needs to be testable, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative with how you test. In fact, part of the challenge is to come up with innovative ways to test your ideas.
• How to start doing a literature search
• First, you have to read! (It’s slow to begin with)
1. Go to Encyclopedic Places (Wikipedia, etc. What is it? What does it mean? What’s been done?)
2. Go to more specific research avenues (Google Scholar (huge selection), ACM (can be limited), etc. Get articles on topic!)
3. Find some papers… Skim them… Is this what I’m interested in? Lucky to find 1 out of the first 4 or 5 (or more.)
4. Find a paper you like… and look up the references
5. Find THOSE papers (probably going to have 10-20 papers)
6. Skim THESE and see which ones you like… and look up those references
7. Look at the references that occur across the papers you like. Which books / papers did everybody read? Go to the source! Don’t read something that’s been watered down through 4-5 different authors. (Besides, the original is probably better than the papers that referenced it anyway.)
8. Make sure you have a “handful” of really good references. Quality, not quantity.
• Easy to lose track… can be very overwhelming! (Find the important ones, so you know whats worth reading and what’s not.)
• Save everything!!! EVERY link, EVERY paper. Structure everything so you know what it is you have already looked into. If you don’t save it you might not be able to find it again.
• End Note (for notes – in Office)
• Zotero (for web tracking)
• Delicious (track links)
• Awesome High Lighter (From Jason)
• Save PDFs after you’re finished reading them just to be safe.
• How do you start a search for exemplars (a really good example, something with extra meaning)?
• Why do you need exemplars?
• It helps you!
• Gives you more ideas
• Keeps you focused
• Keeps you inspired
• Good for your Pitch! (Show examples of what you want to do, and compare them to similar things out there)
• Shows you whats out there already
• Also, can make your argument / presentation that much better
• “Have you seen such and so?” Yes, and what I’m doing is different because…!
• Search for… Artifacts / products / ideas
• Even look for things that relate (out of field), things that are close, things that aren’t close, etc. Know the field!
• If the design notebook is your repository for your ideas, you should also exemplars to build a repository of examples.
• Don’t do this to find the things that you have already designed in your mind… look for things you haven’t thought of / haven’t seen that will help you design whats in your mind.
• Collect. Save. Organize
• If you’ve done the research / homework and you present your ideas, people will much more readily listen to you than if they realize you haven’t.
• Even a highly design oriented project has to do the research to support it!

Bring the Project Management Handbook for the next couple of weeks.

Page 111: Understanding Design