In the past two weeks we have interviewed approximately twelve individuals ranging from professors in the Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and TAM programs here at the University as well as several individuals from industry (both graduate students and non-affiliated industry individuals). The interviewees include university instructors and researchers, among those: Ruth Dameron, Alexander Repenning and Sebastian De La Chica.
The information gathered from these interviews complements information gathered through basic information gathered from the Internet and library searches to date. Currently we have, as a group, reviewed over 20 research and industry articles encompassing the topic of end user design. Our intent is to gather a solid understanding of this area from several perspectives, namely historical, research and applied. Our intent is to understand the tools that have evolved to facilitate end user design, current tools and research in development and enablers as well as challenges in implementing this concept in industry and applied technology. The informal record that summarizes our ongoing work is available at the class Design Independent Research Page (http://l3dswiki.cs.colorado.edu:3232/dlc-2006/61).
Our current focus is in examining the perceived and actual social and technical challenges into the implementation of tools that facilitate end user design. To that end we are exploring research (both University based and from outside sources) that addresses these issues in more detail. We are hoping to leverage off this research in our team project that is focussed on a small subset of this issue as pertains to an ongoing L3D project.
We are currently about 2-3 days behind in our schedule and hope to make up time in the next week to ten days.
The following tasks still have to be completed:
Complete all scheduled interviews by the end of the week (3/17) and determine if any additional interviews need to be conducted.
Complete all research papers by the end of week 3/17.
Synthesize design research into the team project.
Prepare research findings for class and post results to class Swiki.