The purpose of this assignment is to encourage you to think about the implications of design decisions in online communities and the relationship between social science research and design. The design assignment will consist of a 2-3 page single spaced position paper (10% of final grade) that will be posted on a wiki page no later than April 6th and a 10-15 minute presentation (5% of final grade) of the material in class on April 13th. You will have two options for the position paper including:

Position Paper Option 1. Existing Design Feature Explanation. This paper should describe a successful design feature (taken from an existing online community) and relate it to readings from this course, or the paper can describe a failed design feature and use readings from the course to help explain why the feature has failed. The paper should briefly explain the design feature(s) of interest, the community it is a part of, and should focus on how its success or failure relates to literature from the course or related literature. Both theory and empirical research should be included.

Position Paper Option 2. Novel Design Feature Proposal. This paper should use a social science theory to motivate the creation of a novel social and/or technical design idea that could be applied to an online community. A specific online community or type of online community should be selected where the design idea would likely be most effective. The paper should explain the social science theory that motivated the design, the proposed design idea along with its goal or purpose, the type of community the design would work in, and what empirical evidence could be used to demonstrate the new design features effects.

Design Presentation. The design presentation will be given on the final day of class (April 13th) and each student will have approximately 15 minutes to present (8 minutes of presentation and 7 minutes of discussion and questions). The presentation should assume that at least some of the other students have read your position paper and should therefore, extend the position paper in some meaningful way. In particular, the design presentation should include a description of the design space related to the design feature of interest. This should include a description of the purpose of the design feature, what possible design choices would fulfill that purpose (e.g., what others have done), and an explanation of how your design feature fits into the broader design space.

Please Insert a Link to your Position Paper below (no later than April 6th)

ExampleOption1 posted by DerekHansen
ExampleOption2 posted by DerekHansen
ExampleDesignSpace posted by DerekHansen (note: I have included this page to give you an idea of what a design space might look like. You are not required to post a similar document, but you may get some nice feedback if you do. My in class presentation would discuss this design space along with other material.)