Technical Reports

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/35015

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Good Designers do “X”: Embracing the breadth of design practices
(2025-07-08) Cynthia J. Atman; Eileen Zhang; Yuliana Flores; Soraya Grace Barar; Jennifer Turns
Good Designers do “X” is a collection of responses from 35 scholars and educators from the design and engineering design education research communities about what “good” designers do. The collection features 180 shortened statements derived from full responses provided by each respondent. The collection was first developed in February 2022 by researchers at the Center for Engineering Learning & Teaching (CELT) in the University of Washington Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE). As part of a seminar called Dear Design in HCDE, the teaching team crowdsourced responses to a query about Good Designers do “X” in order to provide a broad picture of what could be characterized as effective design practices. The collection can be found online in the teaching resources section of our website, designsignatures.org, and comes in multiple virtual or printable formats for engagement with the collection. The full list of responses can be found in Appendices A and B. This report provides several ways to understand the collection as a whole, a brief outline of three classroom activities that used the Good Designers do “X” collection, and an example of a longer engagement where students drew inspiration from the collection to create postcard visualizations. We believe Good Designers do “X” is a valuable resource to broaden students’ understanding of design.
You have 5 seconds: designing glanceable feedback for physical activity trackers
(ACM, 2015-09-07) Gouveia, Rúben; Pereria, Fábio; Caraban, Ana; Munson, Sean A; Karapanos, Evangelos
People engage with activity trackers in short sessions: over 70% are defined by glances – brief, 5-second sessions where individuals check ongoing activity levels with no further interaction. We explore how to best leverage such short sessions to maximize positive impact on behavior. To do so, we explore the design of Glanceable Behavioral Feedback Interfaces, focusing on three directions for design: increasing the frequency of glances, increasing the impact of glances on physical activity, and promoting moments of exploration and learning with activity trackers.
Designing Methods Towards Resilience: A Critical Reflection on Co-Designing Technology with Families During Early COVID-19
(2022-09-15) Michelson, Rebecca; DeWitt, Akeiylah; Nagar, Ria; Munson, Sean A.; Yip, Jason; Hiniker, Alexis; Kientz, Julie A.;
In the reactive environment of adjusting to remote learning and life during COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, families had few opportunities to collaborate, play, and imagine better futures. Using family resilience theory as a guiding framework, we describe a study of 30 US-based families who participated in a ten-week study using the Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) method between April and July 2020. In this paper, we analyze the affordances of co-design activities for envisioning solutions to family needs during the pandemic and share concerns as well as future directions for designing methods for resilience. Our findings suggest the asynchronous, creative collaboration through playful and open-ended prompts in our study lays the groundwork for cultivating family resilience, and we identify gaps in methods for sustained resiliency. We suggest modifications for applying the ARC method with educational communities and reflect on family engagement for relational commons.
A Cross-Cultural Survey of Emoticon Research Before 2015
(2020-02-02) Chen, Nan-Chen; Perry, Daniel; Saegusa, Hidekazu; Aragon, Cecilia
Emoticons have emerged as a strong means of enhancing text-based communication, and cross-cultural understanding is important in framing emoticon research. This paper provides a cross-cultural comparison of emoticons by reviewing publications and webpages in English, Chinese, and Japanese. To our knowledge, it is the most comprehensive survey of its type, covering well over 100 papers, including some which have never been translated into English. Note that since this paper was written in 2015, our survey focuses on research published before 2015. We also provide a detailed history of the origins of emoticon use. Our hope is to provide a useful resource for researchers to understand early efforts in the field, and foster continued research in emoticons as used in computer-mediated communication (CMC).
Understanding Practices Surrounding Childhood Mementos to Inform the Design of Interactive Technology and Sentimental Record-Keeping
(2017-09-01) Derthick, Katie; Lee, Nicole B.; Sung, Yi-Chen; Kientz, Julie A.;
The saving of childhood mementos is a common practice that has existed for many generations across different cultures. Parents often save physical objects such as baby blankets, toys, or clothing. Designers of interactive technology have the opportunity to learn from and augment the practices surrounding the selecting, saving, sharing, and savoring of these physical objects. To understand the design opportunities for this space, we conducted artifact-based interviews and surveys with parents about the mementos they have saved from their own childhood and are currently saving for their young children. Themes emerged surrounding preserving and using mementos, qualities that imbue value to mementos, meanings associated with sharing mementos, and tensions around saving, clutter, and discarding. The themes highlight qualities of ambivalence and ambiguity surrounding sentimental behavior. We discuss these themes and apply the findings to the design of a new feature of an interactive system for tracking children’s data.
Surveying Scientists About Their Software
(2014-06-24) Paine, Drew; Woodum, Justin M.; Lee, Charlotte
Software is an important infrastructural component of scientific research practice. The work of research often requires scientists to develop, use, and share software in order to address their research questions. This report presents findings from a survey of researchers at the University of Washington in three broad areas: Oceanography, Biology, and Physics. This survey is part of the National Science Foundation funded study Scientists and their Software: A Sociotechnical Investigation of Scientific Software Development and Sharing (ACI-1302272). We inquired about each respondent’s research area and data use along with their use, development, and sharing of software. Finally, we asked about challenges researchers face with and about concerns regarding software’s effect on study replicability. These findings are part of ongoing efforts to develop deeper characterizations of the role of software in twenty-first century scientific research.
Data, Software, and Advanced Computational Usage of University of Washington Research Leaders
(2014-02-27) Paine, Drew; Sy, Erin; Chen, Ying-Yu; Lee, Charlotte
Scientific research is increasingly data-intensive, relying more and more upon advanced computational resources to be able to answer the questions most pressing to our society at large. This report presents findings from a brief descriptive survey sent to a sample of 342 leading researchers at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, Washington in 2010 and 2011 as the first stage of the larger National Science Foundation project “Interacting with Cyberinfrastructure in the Face of Changing Science.” This survey assesses these researcher’s use of advanced computational resources, data, and software in their research. We present high-level findings that describe UW researchers’: demographics, interdisciplinarity, research groups, data use, software and computational use—including software development and use, data storage and transfer activities, and collaboration tools, and computing resources. These findings offer insights into the state of computational resources in use during this time period as well as offering a look at the data intensiveness of UW researchers.
Role of Automated Open Source Systems in the Intelligence Analysis of a High-Level Domain Expert
(2010) Thomas, Timothy; Damera, Pallavi; Haselkorn, Mark
This exploratory case study examines the interactions between a high-level domain expert engaged in political analysis and the output of a semi-automated commercial open-source analytic system. The study used an in-context think-aloud methodology to extract rich information on the analytical strategies used by the expert as he addressed a typical socio-political analytical task. The task involved the political stability of the uranium-mining region of Northern Niger and included access to relevant processed open source information. The focus of the research was on the cognitive processes of the analyst, including analytic strategies and information gathering behaviors. Three main strategic patterns were observed: (1) the population of a pre-existing cognitive model with relevant information; (2) the identification of relationships between model elements; and (3) the application of analytic judgment to these relationships. The findings in this study reveal misalignments between expert analytic processes and the current design of open source systems, but they also strongly suggest that, designed and used appropriately, automated open-source analytic systems have a valuable role to play in supporting the cognitive tasks of high-level analysts and in helping ensure that experts consider key lines of inquiry that directly impact analytic conclusions. The findings of this study have application for shaping the co-evolution of intelligence analysis and computerized open-source extraction systems.

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