Thesis Proposal

Taking a cue from Matt’s summer musings, it is time for me to talk a bit about the next major project in my life: the doctoral thesis.

The Peter’s book I have sloooooowly been reading this summer () is filled with useful information about prepping for the Ph.D. program. The first third of the book was advice on stuff that is no longer applicable to me, like finding a school and applying. The middle part is about getting settled into good habits within the rigors of the curriculum, setting up an environment constructive to success. That encompasses forming a committee, interacting with faculty and colleagues, and choosing a thesis topic. I have been too mired in other summer project work to get into the last part, about doing the thesis and getting work from it, but that will come.

I’ve got a short list of potential topics slowly finding some form. I hope to write up each of the half dozen or so ideas into 1-2 page overviews and then get some discussion going with the people I might want to serve on my committee. This post is my first attempt to get them down in some coherent fashion, even if much of this is too broad to be an actual thesis:

• 3rdParty.org — An extension of my master’s work, the idea is to leverage the time I am going to be spending on the doctoral thesis into concrete ideas and solutions that benefit this project. Third Party is a self-organizing ideology, now leveraging a more-or-less integrated open source forum that includes a discussion board, blog, wiki and rudimentary chat rooms. There are many challenges here … HCI systems design, open source community issues, collaborative discussion, Internet as a vehicle for political change, knowledge transfer within an online community, network analysis, extracting meaning and relevance from volumes of raw content. The two big advantages I see are (a) the project is already underway, and (b) it has real-world value.
• Home Schooling Network — As a lifelong advocate of public schools, I despise the idea behind home schooling. Setting aside the variance in the quality of education that it encompasses, it removes active families and (more often than not) positive peer role models from the public school community. Religion, safety and educational philosophy are three big reasons parents choose to home school their kids. I’m faced with an undesireable decision (being made as a family) to pull Carter from University Elementary and home schooling him. I’ll save my consternation about this for another post, but from an academic perspective the phenomenon of home schooling is ripe for analysis and design. If I were to find myself thrust into this community, there are many practical advantages to devoting my thesis time to understanding it better. I am particularly taken with this idea calling for a reform of public schools using a home schooling model. More focused study might concentrate on network analysis of the home schooling community, impact of home schooling on education, user-centric design for students, parents and public school administrators, or analysis of this community as a complex system.
• Complex Design — This idea stems from a great introductory class into complexity by Alex and Sandro. The concepts we were taught (fractality, agent-based modeling, network theory) all might become useful tools in a design framework. As a thesis project, some or all of these other projects mentioned could become fodder to test and advance this kind of theory into practice. There is also a strong undercurrent of support in the Informatics program here at IU to advance this idea, and it spans all of my interests in a way that would keep the faculty with whom I want to associate involved. The downside is that as it stands, this is pretty broad … and I’m not sure how it can become more focused.
• design eXchange — The brainchild and current passion of Eli and Youn, the design eXchange is an attempt to bring design studio culture to Informatics as an online content management system. I am currently working for the rest of this summer on a working version of this, massively scaled down to some basics, that will be given to the incoming first-year masters students to use. The idea is that these personal studios can interact with group studios and be maintained from year to year. There are a lot of academic hooks here, too: HCI system design, long-term impact on academic culture, discovery of meaning in published content, open source implementations, network analysis of content and user relationships. This could also easily have a cross-department feel to it to keep very different faculty involved in my work, and while it doesn’t impact the general public in any significant way, it would have the potential to alter the IU Informatics community.
• Politic Exchange — A different focus than 3rdParty.org, this is an idea that would apply relational-cultural theory (RCT) from the Stone Center to political discussions. In my master’s project, I termed this “mutual politics” after one of the key terms of RCT, mutuality. This would be a combination of theory and practice as the main thrust would be to expand on the work of WebLab and their small group dialogue forums, studying the effects of certain configuration variables on the connection between forum members. In the end, I would want at least the detailed and well-supported blueprint for how to design a more engaging political forum. This is an idea that is over a decade old for me, so there is a lot of dormant thinking behind it. It could be a very focused project without detracting from my interest.
• Sports Jobs Network — A sports informatics kind of thesis project that would involve complex network theory to figure out how coaches, athletes and programs impact each other. This is a pretty vague interest at the moment, but I think I could do some background and pose a hypothesis to test. The byproduct might be information that could be used in recruiting coaches and players.
• Basketball Passing — This may be downgraded quickly to an independent study as a chance to work with a complex systems prof on a sports project this semester. The idea is that in-game passing of a basketball can be characterized as a network. Enough analysis of the many, many games available might produce some enlightening trends and invariate properties. I could see this becoming a part of a larger thesis, if we have success in the smaller study. The upside is that, if I want to leave with my Ph.D. for a job in the sports industry or teaching sports informatics, the more sports-centric projects I can do the better. The downside is that it holds much less interest for some key HCI faculty I want to become involved with my work.
• Relational Design — As is the case with Complex Design above, this would be an attempt to apply RCT to the PRInCiPleS design framework and come up with new tools and techniques to aid with design. Where Complex Design is more about identifying component parts of an interaction to understand how they relate to each other and the system properties that emerge, Relational Design is about focusing on and increasing the connection between components. I would get to bring in the Stone Center to this kind of work, which would be cool, and it holds potential interest for both HCI and complex systems people.
• Sustainable Design (late-breaking addition) — This is Eli’s career research direction, and one of some personal interest. One of the central ideas is that destruction is a part of creation, that the things we build are meant to replace other things or one day be replaced themselves. There is likely some complexity/emergence embedded here, as well as some opportunity to help Eli’s framework out by applying these ideas to any of the projects above (say, online community building).