A12 - Case Study Proposal

Due by NOON on Saturday March 29 – turn in on bcourses

This isn’t being graded… its purpose is to make you get serious about a case study idea after you've been thinking about it for two months in an informal way. You will get feedback on your proposal and might need to revise it. You will be presenting your case study idea for a minute or two on Thursday April 3.

Write at most four paragraphs; should be much less than a printed page of text (numbered like these instructions) that briefly:

1. Describes a title and the domain for your case study (clearly identify the scope and scale of the resources)
2. Mentions at least one interesting design question about resource selection, resource description, organizing principles, interactions, or maintenance.  You don’t have to answer it.  You could say “I’m interested in learning more about how interactions are prioritized when there are so many different types of users of these resources…” or “The organizing systems in this domain have changed a lot because of new sensor and communication technologies; I want to study that.” (You should also choose a domain where organizing systems follow some kind of life cycle because your case study will need to talk about the activities of resource selection, organizing, interaction design, and maintenance).
3. Explains why you have chosen this particular domain (Why is this interesting to you?  Do you have any special experience or expertise?)
4. Proposes one or more possible “artifacts” or “representations” that capture the essence of the organizing system (photo, diagram, map, flowchart, concept graph… like those in the January 28 lecture).  It is OK to say “I don’t have any ideas here” because that will make the teaching team think harder to come up with ideas for you. 

The first paragraph might evolve into the first paragraph of your completed case study. (For good examples, look at the case studies you’ve read). You should choose a domain that isn't too similar to any of the existing case studies we've read so far and that is intellectually deep enough that it lets you demonstrate your mastery of course concepts and vocabulary. 

If any of your other courses require you to do a project, it is OK to have your S&O case study project overlap with these other ones because your case should use the “Design Questions” of Chapter 2 TDO (January 23) as an outline and your other class project surely won’t.

On Thursday April 3 each of you will have one minute to introduce your case study to the class and a minute to respond to questions or comments.  In that presentation you should emphasize the first two of the paragraphs – the resource domain and the interesting design questions. You don’t need any slides; you just need to have your booming voice ready so we all can hear your proposal.

So why is your proposal due Saturday March 29 by noon?  We’ll review your proposal very quickly and either approve it (with some suggestions), tell you some things you could do to make it more suitable as a case study, or tell you that we think you need to come up with another topic.  (we’ll tell you this if you propose something that doesn’t seem very challenging – like “my email inbox” or “my closet”).  You’ll get this feedback no later than Monday noon so you’ll have time to think about it…