Group Projects and Presentations

This semester, each group will decide what kind of application or service to develop for delivery on an iPhone. The application or service must in some vital way aid people to live, work and play in a sustainable world. So the challenge is to design an application or service that will comply with and further the principles of economic, social, and ecological sustainability.

The first step is for each group to narrow the field of possibilities and to decide on the scope of an application or service that will be manageable for the people who will be using it (in other words, try to avoid imagining something that can double as a dessert topping and a floor wax!). Think about what you could design that could influence the behavior of users. Here are some examples of domains within which you might work:

1. energy consumption: you might focus on trying to help people improve the management of energy consumption around their homes, in making transportation choices, in making purchasing decisions (both of consumable goods such as food and durable goods such as refrigerators)
2. water consumption: a topic much in the news lately and possibly a more serious issue for global stability than the swindling of oil supplies.
3. recycling issues
4. more general problems of waste and landfills

By October 10, your group needs to have come up with a specific kind of application or service to pursue and to have outlined the research questions each group member will undertake. By October 24, each group needs to have developed a fairly stable and robust set of features or capabilities and the interface design should be well under way. By November 7, the date of the first prototyping session, interface elements for a complete user test and a test protocol need to be developed. The second prototyping session (December 5) should build on the first but should use an online iPhone simulator to test some aspects of the interaction in a technological setting.

On December 12, each group will give an oral presentation of its development project using whatever supporting materials are appropriate, including digital or paper prototypes and powerpoint slides or the equivalent. The presentation should include a discussion of the problem, the areas of research, the prototyped solution, the findings from participatory design sessions, and (hypothetical) next steps. Each group will have 20 minutes for its presentation and 5 minutes for questions and answers.

Each group must prepare and hand in a CD with the presentation and photos of its prototype(s) plus the test protocols it used for the two prototyping sessions on December 12.