As someone who architected the Masters program in Interaction Design here at Malmö University, and co-teaching it for nine years now, I have to disagree somewhat with Jay Kumar and take a middle road here.
Designing and prototyping is an essential part of the Masters, as I see it, and one of the things that sets it apart from a degree in human-computer interaction or cognitive science. It is not that the prototype illustrates something already thought, but what you are looking for is rather signs that the students is capable of thinking by sketching and prototyping. Plus, a prototype can be assessed in ways that a non-built design can't (including, but certainly not limited to, conventional "user testing.") On the other hand, implementation and deployment usually falls far outside the topical scope of a Masters thesis in interaction design. Not to mention how far outside a normal student's time, skill and resource limits it falls. Deploying a community website fully is something completely different from finishing a work of visual art, in my opinion. To get back to your specific case, Jack, if your student had done her degree work at our school I suppose I would have been looking for - a design detailed to the level of a prototype presenting her new ideas on how to "facilitate a community for female cancer victims", plus - a good line of arguments backing her claim that the new design would in fact facilitate the community. This is not equal to "building the whole site, deploying, observing use in practice" but could be approached by, e.g., a triangulation of -- field studies of existing communities, -- sociological theory on bereavement/illness community mechanisms, -- reasoning around key design decisions and explored alternatives, and -- experiments with elements of her key ideas through roleplay, dramatization, or longitudinal mid-fi off-the-shelf-component-based prototype testing. Regards, Jonas Löwgren ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
