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Framing : what are we working on and what encouraged us doing so ?

  • the general theme --- explicit formulation of the disciplinary field in which our work/contribution will take place
  • the context --- a phenomenon or a situation that is interesting for us, situated in time and space
  • why we think it's an interesting topic ?
 

Problem statement / Challenge : what is not working as we think it should ?

  • how things should work ? what knowledge would be interesting to have ?
  • description of the problem, or the missing knowledge, and how it showed up
    [NB : may need a study to validate the need with methods like these]
  • the motivation --- why solving that is important ?
 

Bibliography : what have already been done, and what there's still to do ?

  • very short introduction to the school of thought / community of practice in which our contribution will take place
  • who worked on some aspects of the problem we've identified ? How ? What was their goal ? What did they manage to achieve ? What did they miss ?
    [NB : describe these works regarding several aspects or "dimensions", on which you'll be able to compare these past contributions. That process builds up what we call a "design space"]
    [NB : find a balance between presenting the most recent works, the "state-of-the-art", and the most important past contributions, the "seminal works"]
 

Position statement : how do we identify the work we're doing, compared to what has already been done ?

  • the position --- what part of the problem we want to address / act on ? what specific part of the "design space" we want to explore (compared to the works presented in the bibliography) ? what is the bad effect we want to counter ? or the good effect we want to foster ? or the knowledge we want to contribute to ?
  • the target --- what people / users are concerned ?
 

Research question : what are we aiming to ?

  • a precise question that we want to answer (all the rest of our work will tend to answer that question)
  • the hypotheses --- what we expect, given what we already know from the litterature
 

Design

  • what we started from (data, frameworks, existing designs, etc.) ?
  • what we developped to validate / invalidate our hypothesis ?
  • a grounded explanations for the design choices
  • a precise description of the use / activity
    [NB : that can be done with storyboards, user journeys, etc.]
 

Protocol : how we will validate that we've reached our aim ?

  • what we will measure / analyze ? how ?
    [NB : could be quantitative (measuring an effect) or qualitative (describing and catacterizing a phenomenon, observing tendances, identifying patterns), a field study or a lab study, free or controlled, etc.]
    [NB : the methods and apparatus should be precisely described, including materials, methods, scripts for studies and questions for surveys, etc.]
 

Analysis : what have we observed / measured / validated ?

  • a description of the effects / phenomena we've observed and measured
  • what conclusion do we draw from that analysis ?
  • how does it answer our research question and validate/invalidate our hypothesis
 

Future work : what is the territory for further contributions ?

  • implications for design
  • perspectives to continue our work and provide additional contributions (allows to position our contribution more precisely, by explaining what else could be explored/validated, in comparison to what we already explored/validated)
 

Discussion