Design Cycle: Investigate Paper

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Design Cycle: Investigate Paper

So far we have discussed the Design Cycle, and you have written an ‘About’ page for your Web site as well as a general paper on the Design Cycle. Your next assignment is to apply the first step of the Design Cycle: Investigate, to your Personal Project. You will write a paper that will be easily transferred to a HTML document. Use this format How to Write a Paper

For this paper you need to relate your Personal Project to the Areas of Interaction. You need to construct your paper as follows:

• Discuss the relevance of your Personal Project as it relates to one of the Areas of Interaction. Your project should relate to at least one of the Areas of Interaction.
• Use information from a broad range of resources—this should include a minimum of five sources, three of which must be people and one of these your Project Supervisor. “What is given?” Here you need to research your sources of information and interview/talk with ‘expert’ witnesses in order to gather the appropriate information needed to attain your Goal State.

When writing your paper you will use the block format and a serif font (Arial, Helvetica, etc.) The text will be single spaced, and indented. You are writing it this way so that you can export it to your Project Web site. All of your sources should be cited using the MLA format…this is the format that you have been using in all of your classes. You should also spell check and use good grammar. Below is a refresher on the Investigative phase of the Design Cycle. Remember, this is the only thing that you are concerned with right now. In a nutshell, you want to break down your project in this phase and describe all of the steps you used to make this a complete investigation.

Investigate
Identify the problem to be solved.

• Evaluate the importance of the problem for life, society, and the environment
• Outline the design brief.

Formulate a design specification.

• List the specific requirements that must be met by the product/solution.
• Design tests to evaluate the product/solution against the design specification.

Step I: Investigate vs. Read. Obviously, Investigate is the broader term. Read is a good term to use when solving mathematical problems, but problem solving does not stop there. Every “challenge” in life can be defined as a problem. With time, some challenges simply become routine habits—like feeding yourself in the morning. One of the better definitions for Investigate comes from Wikipedia. In this definition they are using the term "exploratory search"—after all, that is what you are doing when you are first confronted with a problem and realize that something needs to be done. I give you, Wikipedia: “Exploratory search is a specialization of information exploration — a broader class of activities where new information is sought in a defined conceptual area; exploratory data analysis is another example of an information exploration activity. In exploratory search, users generally combine querying and browsing strategies to foster learning and investigation.”

In essence, this is where you define your problem and acquire an understanding of it. In terms of an algorithm this is where we define our Initial State. ”Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as, person, situation and message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object.” (ibid.)

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