The Solution Proposal (SP2) project project results in a screencast video that proposes your team's strategies for addressing the issue(s) at the core of a problem scenario. The SP2 is challenging because it requires your team to develop and refine solutions, which involves cycles of research, design, & assessment.
SP2 is the final assignment in the project set that includes the Team Statement, Problem Statement, Solution Prototype, & Solution Proposal. These projects are linked by team & topic. Once your design team chooses a focus for the Proposal project, that problem becomes the common ground for all 4 projects for your team. If your team has not yet selected a focus, review the Project Pathways & Knowledge Building section of this description as a team, & choose the problem that best fits your team's collective abilities & interests.
This project requires one submission. That submission includes the following documents:
For the full list of core and supporting documents/files, & specifications, refer to Submission Requirements.
The Solution Proposal is the culmination of your work on this project series. It requires you to propose a set of strategies for investigating and addressing the core problem(s) in your chosen challenge scenario. Your task is not to design a solution to the whole problem. Wicked problems (that is, problems with a high degree of complexity) require strategic, system approaches to developing solutions. Both of the challenge scenarios are beyond the scope of a single semester to resolve. Rather, your goal for this assignment set is to propose pathways by which your design team could contribute to addressing the problem(s) using your developing professional knowledge.
I assume that this project set will challenge you beyond your current knowledge & abilities. I assume that you will need to explore (likely by several pathways) knowledge that will help you understand the general complexity & the specific details of the challenge scenario you chose to work on. That is, when you encounter concepts, language, contexts, & details that you lack comprehensive knowledge of, you'll need to use the tools & services available to you to conduct research into those things. You'll need to conduct internet searches for relevant information (e.g., definitions, articles, web content, sample apps & other information products). You'll need to integrate smart tools into your research & design processes.
However, regardless of the tools you implement into your work, you must serve in the role of the human information designer during this assignment set. That is, you must guide the tools in search of the knowledge & strategies you need. You must assess the quality & plausibility of the ideas that result. You must choose which ideas to investigate further, incorporate into your design vision, and then develop & explain to your audience members & stakeholders. Your team is the final arbitor of design decisions, & the voice that presents your proposed solutions. This is bricolage in action. For more about that concept, keep reading. Although you may have read this passage before, it will continue to become richer in meaning as this project series unfolds.
Every assignment in this project series links to the whole design endeavor that confronts you. With that in mind, it is timely to discuss the notion of design bricolage in the context of content strategy & creation.
The terms bricolage & bricoleur emerged from architecture connected with the practice of harnessing the knowledge & abilities of available personnel to design architectural solutions for problems using the materials & equipment on hand. In other words, bricolage is about design enacted only with the tools, resources, & expertise to which you already have access. A bricoleur is a designer capable of such adaptation. Bricolage is a particularly appropriate design mindset for technical communication & information design, given the impact that immediate context has on the design decisions that lead to effective solutions.
For our purposes in this course, bricolage is your perpetual state of design. That is, you only know what you have learned so far during your studies & experiences, & the palette of tools you have available at any given moment is often limited either by their availability or by your level of ability to produce a professional solution with the available tools. The one element of the project you can control is your own level of investment & dedication to the tasks ahead of you. Thus, you are limited in this project series mainly by your current level of professional development & your degree of willingness to invest in learning what you need to learn on the fly to proceed with a professional information design solution for the problem you choose to engage.
Your team must choose one of the scenarios described below as a focus for its work throughout this project series. The scenarios provide framing & context, but your team determines what it judges to be an appropriate strategy for addressing the problem. Neither of the scenarios or organizations in them are real, although all elements of these scenarios are plausible & realistic.
The Community Farm. Food Is Life, a local nonprofit organization with a history of working to counter the City of Saginaw's federal designation as a food desert, has been gifted with a warehouse on a plot of land.
After much debate, Food Is Life decided to transform the site into a community farm. They envision using 3 of the 4 inner floors as a year-round hydroponic farm that grows vegetables & raises sustainable livestock (e.g., chickens), with the last floor serving several connected purposes: storing & managing produce; housing a kitchen classroom that serves meals to needy citizens & provides a space for teaching nutrition, food preparation, and so on. Food Is Life will establish a rooftop garden for crops that are difficult to grow indoors, & reclaim half of the site's green & brown spaces as community gardens that can be rented to individual citizens as family garden plots.
Food Is Life reached out to your design team to seek assistance in developing appropriate information solutions to support this project.
The SVSU Office for Community Connection (OCC). SVSU prides itself on community connection, work that resulted in the university earning the Carnegie Foundation's Community Engagement classification in 2015. The SVSU OCC serves the university by working to maintain the level of service activity necessary to maintain that designation.
One of the biggest challenges for the SVSU OCC is managing communication. Community organizations who are interested in seeking assistance are not always certain who to contact or what kind of activities are appropriate for SVSU participation. Students, faculty, & staff are not always made aware in a timely manner of the organizations seeking assistance or of the kinds of opportunities for service learning & public intellectualism that are available to them. SVSU also struggles to develop appropriate mechanisms for celebrating individual contributions & achievements of people who participate & who want a way of sharing such work with prospective employers or other interested audiences. The university has considered a special designation for diplomas, a badging, system, and more, but remains uncertain about how to proceed.
The SVSU OCC reached out to your design team to seek assistance in developing appropriate information solutions to support the OCC's work.
Deliverables: memo, proposal
Document scope: 150 words (memo), 8 to 10 minutes (proposal)
Project value: 450 points (50 points for Version 1, 400 points for V2)
Evaluation rubric: _Eval_SolutionProposal.pdf
Recommended tool(s): Microsoft Word (memo, proposal); Figma (supporting design docs); OpenAI ChatGPT (research support); Techsmith Capture, CapCut (video)
The SP2 project requires you to design an 8 to 10 minute screencast video that proposes strategies for for investigating and addressin the core problem(s) relevant to the challenge scenario your team has chosen to work on. Again, your task is not to design a solution to the whole problem. Rather, your goal is to propose pathways by which your design team could contribute to addressing the problem(s) using your developing professional knowledge.
Create a research document that is shared with everyone from your design team. Use that doc to gather all of the knowledge that you accumulate through your work for the project series.
Follow the procedure that you used in the Vision Cone workshop to conduct an examination of your chosen challenge scenario. You may not be able to provide a lot of detail for Panel 3 (that examines how we got here), but do your best. Lean into the tools we have been using for research to assist you with that inquiry. Take your time to develop as many ideas as you can and as deeply as you can for panels 2, 4, 6, and 7. All of these will help you understand your challenge scenario & communicate confidently about it and its potential solutions.
In our Using ChatGPT workshop, you practiced strategies for designing prompts to explore problems. Use & refine that knowledge here. I recommend a dialogic approach for this specific application of the tool. While I was designing this project set, I began with the following prompt.
The bot responded by telling me it did indeed understand. It then summarized the details and asked this question of me.
The dialog that followed between the bot and I resulted in it making several offers to elaborate & expand on details, & even to draw diagrams for apps & websites. I let it do all of those things, probing for deeper knowledge, & changing the direction of its explorations from time to time.
I was genuinely impressed with the results, although not all of it was on point, & I would draw on/expand upon only the best ideas from the session. This is what I meant above when I said that you must serve in the role of the human information designer during this assignment set. Again, it becomes your responsibility to guide the tool in search of the knowledge & strategies you need, assess the quality & plausibility of the ideas that result, and choose which ideas to investigate further. For everything that these tools do well, they cannot understand the human experience. You must therefore determine which ideas have the greatest human potential, and fill in the knowledge & strategy gaps that emerge when the tools fail in being human.
For the Problem Statement project, you crafted a preliminary problem statement. Revisit that document now. Informed by the research that you have conducted to expand your knowledge of the problem & explore strategies for addressing it, rewrite your problem statement. Follow the same pathways & standards as you did for the PS project.
Construct a list of all of the ways that the challenge scenario might be effectively & humanely addressed. Note the places where your design prototype might fit into the discussion of the problem & resolution of the problem(s).
During the early stages of work for the Solution Prototype project, I instructed you to craft a narrow design statement about the way your prototype would contribute to your larger solution. Craft a design statement here to address the larger array of issues. Specifically, craft a design statement that follows this pattern:
Build a screening document that details your proposed strategies for addressing the challenge scenario. Keep in mind that the doc you present from must be complete enough to stand on its own. That is, the doc is essentially a proposal in the form of a slide deck. It should include the following content & design elements.
Hint. Provide the kind of evidence that you think would help audience members understand that the problem exists and how it affects the community and the people who are directly impacted.
Hint. Draw on your Vision Cone analysis. Panel 4 represents your goals. Panel 7 defines your objectives. The proposal guide, Winning Grants (O'Neal-McElrath, Kanter, & Jenkins), states the relationship between goals & objectives this way: "goals are what the program aspires to achieve, and objectives should clarify what changes you expect to see as a result of your work." Also, don't confuse objectives with strategies (see the next section).
Hint. Panel 6 represents the pathway to reach your goals & achieve your outcomes. Detail is essential here. It is important that you explain carefully what is involved in each solution stage. I recommend a slide for each step along the pathway.
Hint. Citation is a process for demonstrating how and when you draw on professionally relevant resources during your assessment process. This may include published articles and books, websites, podcasts, and more. Cite every image that you borrow. (You need not cite original images that you create.) This process is an essential element of your professional respect and responsibility.
Hint. Whenever possible, use images that you capture or create. Do not rely on images from other sources unless you must. All images, tables and so on must be identified by figure/table numbers and titles. Use these identifiers to direct readers to their location in the document.
Hint. I provide design samples and explanations to help you understand how to create professional, usable documents. Draw on that supporting content as you work. Do not use the sample documents as templates, but do note the patterns that shape content in them. Note the way other documents you interact with present information. What strategies feel most professional to you? Learn from and emulate those strategies in your own work.
To create your project video, you'll need a plan & an app for recording. Decide as a team how you want to record. Note that you do not have to have everyone speak during the presentation. Consider the following options.
For this configuration, begin with your team in a call together. The call host is the person who'll need to record the video. That person needs to use one of the recording tools discussed in the next segment to capture the video. Refer to the instructions below for more on what that looks like.
I recommend that you use Techsmith Capture, Loom, Inc. Loom, or CapCut (all platforms), or Apple Quicktime (Mac) to record your video. All of these are free tools. Note that Capture is an app embedded in the interface of your account at Screencast.com.
You may also consider Techsmith SnagIt or Camtasia. If you have access to either of these packages, I recommend that you opt for one of those tools as your first choice.
Whatever tool you choose, store your video on Screencast.com, and follow the procedures in this description for sharing that video through your project memo.
Note: Loom offers streaming from that host site. You may take advantage of this if you choose to record in Loom. The only thing I do not want to see is for you to post MP4 files in Dropbox, Canvas, or elsewhere that is not a streaming service.
When you are ready to record, follow this procedure.
Although you can record your whole screen, always instead designate the portion of your screen that viewers need to see as your recording window. This results in a more-professional recording.
Your project submissions will be accompanied by memos of transmittal. That category of memo introduces the document it accompanies, providing context for its audience(s). Your memo should be addressed from you to me.
Your memo for Version 1 of your Solution Prototype should incorporate the following content and design elements.
Consult the sample documents (refer to SVSU Canvas Files: Project Support) for additional guidance.
Your memo for Version 2 of your Solution Prototype should incorporate the following content and design elements.
Consult the sample documents (refer to SVSU Canvas Files: Project Support) for additional guidance.
This section is designed to help you anticipate and avoid problems as you work on this project. Therefore, as you work, consider the following hints and tips.
Approach this assignment & the whole project series like a design bricoleur. Harness your collective energy, creativity, & knowledge. If you encounter a word, concept, tool, or anything else that you cannot confidently & accurately understand, seek knowledge. You have an incredible array of tools & services available to you for gathering new knowledge: the SVSU library; professional social media platforms; peers & colleagues; internet-based research tools. Adapt & overcome. Become a resilient, self-reliant, strategic information designer.
Research the challenge scenario you choose. Seek understanding of relevant scenario details: examples of parallel problems & solutions, terminology, evaluation of solutions, and so on. Seek knowledge using the tools highlighted in the description above. Identify what makes potential solutions plausible or not, effective or not. Apply that knowledge during your own developmental work.
Remember that writing in professional & technical contexts values highly the ability to write and speak with economy, directness, and professionalism. Another way of saying this is to make every word count. Stay focused on the details necessary to communicate effectively with your audience(s). Write and rewrite until your textual content makes sense and represents careful, concise, professional communication.
Consider what it means to establish a strong, consistent sense of professionalism & attention to detail visually and structurally (organizationally) with your design choices. Professional designers use words such as clean, logical, and orderly to describe document designs they appreciate & respect.
If you want to explore the opposite of these design values, feel free to do so. Make an alternate version of your profile document where you make unprofessional font, color, and design choices. Create something ugly so you might better appreciate professionalism in visual design. Just be sure you don't accidentally turn in that version as your project submission.
Edit carefully, seeking to express your ideas clearly and concisely. Edit out loud with the intent of writing in such a manner that your written content sounds professional and focused. Work to meet the design specs. Scrutinize your work so it is consistent, professional, and of good quality. Refine your document continuously as you work.
Read and attend carefully to these submission guidelines. Failure to do so may result in points lost on the final evaluation of your project.
Create a folder for this project inside your shared class folder on Dropbox.com. Remember, I can only view files that you place inside that folder. Until you place files in that space, you have not in practice submitted them.
Name the folder Solution Proposal.
Make sure the files listed below are available to me in the project folder by the submission deadline. Model your filenames on the listed examples:
Note. Do not share the individual files or project folder with me. By placing the project files in the project folder, and by placing the project folder inside your class folder, you have already shared them by default.
Make sure the files listed below are available to me in the project folder by the submission deadline. Model your filenames on the listed examples:
Note. Do not share the individual files or project folder with me. By placing the project files in the project folder, and by placing the project folder inside your class folder, you have already shared them by default.
This section describes the standards by which the Version 1.0 & Version 2.0 submissions will be evaluated.
There are 50 possible points for the prototype stage of this project. You will earn points according to the following standard.
The final project submission is worth 100 possible points. You will earn points according to the standard described on the policies page (see Policies for a description of these categories).
The specific areas of emphasis for the PT project are drawn from this description and our discussions of the project (including the supporting teaching materials that I provide to you along the way). Review the project rubric (_Eval_SolutionProposal.pdf) for the specific qualities and characteristics emphasized in each evaluation category.
Remember that I will only post the point values for projects on the Grades page in SVSU Canvas. I will provide the supporting details relevant to that evaluation in your class folder in a project-specific file. Look for a Microsoft Word file in your shared class space on Dropbox with a filename that that follows this pattern:
TeamName_Eval_SolutionProposal.docx.
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