Categories: design, graduate school, learning

The teams have been formed, research is underway, and the brainstorming process has begun. The initial stages for our CHI 2008 project is well on its way. This weekend I spent most of my time in focus group discussions and team meeting analyzing our data. Sadly, I ended up catching a fever on Friday night due to the cold climate conditions and being sleep deprived. As a graduate student, you just hope things don’t get worse and keep on truckin’.

For those unfamiliar, CHI is an international academic conference for human-computer interaction. Our four-person team will be participating in the student design competition where we will be competing against universities across the globe. In summary, the design problem is to design an object, interface, system, or service intended to support the state of living without a house. Using methods of ethnography and contextual research to understand the problem space, and develop user-centered design solutions to support, assist, enhance or otherwise benefit your target audience. The solution could address the environmental state of being without a house, including issues of physical sustenance and safety, or it could investigate the emotional, social and cultural needs of this group of people.

One dilemma that many designers will face is dealing with the University’s Human Subject Committee (HSC) policies. Under HSC, the homeless is a “vulnerable population” and a protected group. Therefore, we cannot include any data directly retrieved from the homeless population in our research. Due to these restrictions, its essential for groups to become creative in their research.

Since we cannot obtain information from the homeless directly, many of the design teams decided that it was to their best interest if they gathered data indirectly. To get around the HSC issue, our research will be based from people who have direct contact with the homeless. This includes social services agencies, government administration, homeless shelters employees, food bank distributors, and other government organizations that support the homeless. I have some other methods in mind such as cultural probes, but I need to verify with HSC if the method violates any of their policies.

Indiana University is known to place in the top twelve the past couple of years at CHI. In many ways this is great for our HCI/d program, but it does produce a lot of pressure to this incoming class of first-year graduate students. However, I welcome the challenge and look forward to what the future may hold for our team.

It will be interesting to see how many teams from Indiana University will place in the top 10 this year.