Goals

The goal of this assignment is for you to further develop the core motivational strategies that make up the foundation of your project and to write the theoretical justification sections of your final paper.  You will be synthesizing the material from readings and applying those ideas to your design; this process should help you substantially strengthen your final project.  

Part 1: Become familiar with the required paper format

At the end of the term you will turn in a 6-8 page conference-quality paper in CHI format describing the problem addressed by the design, the theoretical motivations, what was learned during the design process, the operation of the system/environment, and a proposed scientific methodology for evaluating the persuasive impact.  

Download the information on the format and create a template for yourself. 

Part 2: Create a preliminary abstract for your paper/project

Write a short abstract (a paragraph) that clearly describes the core intellectual contribution you think your final project will make. You should  succinctly and convincingly state what your project will show about designing persuasive environments or technologies. Reading your abstract should convey to the reader what is new and interesting about your ideas. 

Writing good abstracts is hard. Stephen will critique abstracts at any time if you send them via email. 

Part 3: Create 3 preliminary (and very different) titles for your paper/project

After your abstract add a set of keywords. Then, use these keywords to develop 3 good but very different titles for your project/paper. The best titles capture the most interesting idea as well as the reader's attention and are detailed but not excessively long. 

Part 4: Create an outline for your paper

Now create an outline for your paper. Minimally, you should have: 

• An introduction that (1) summarizes the idea, (2) describes the problem (with citations to relevant sources), and (3) presents a compelling reason why the problem your project solves is an important one and can be addressed by your proposed system.  
• A system overview that describes the high-level design of your system and the motivation (citing relevant work) of creating it that way. You could use a short scenario in this section or in the introduction to clarify the ideas, but if so this must be done carefully so it is appropriate for a scientific paper. 
• A related work section that succinctly but comprehensively summarizes any related devices/environments. This section should also provide a solid description of why particular persuasive strategies have been selected and why others have not.  This section should show you have thought deeply about the assigned readings and the relationship between the ideas presented there and your project ideas.
• A design section that describes all aspects of your design in depth. This section may also include insights learned during the design process and will again reference specific persuasive strategies.  
• An evaluation section that either describes the experiment you conducted with results or describes the testing of the prototype you built. You need to make a convincing argument that your ideas will work for motivating your target behavior changes, not just for a short time period but for periods of months and years.   
• A contributions section that wraps up your paper and clearly delineates what is new, interesting, and important about your work relative to what has been done before.  
• An acknowledgements section that gives credit where credit is due.   
• A references cited section (expect this ultimately to have 30-60 references). If you don't know how to use endnote and/or bibtex your life will be made easier if you learn. 

Part 5: Write the introduction, system overview, and related work sections. 

Create drafts of these sections. Writing is an excellent exercise to help clarify ideas. By doing this you will get a head start on your final paper. These sections should look fairly polished so that they can be critiqued. 

Part 6: Fill in as many ideas about the design as you can. 

This can be much less complete that then first three sections but you should have a good idea of exactly what you are doing that should come through here.  

Part 6: Have three friends outside of the class proofread your work

Fix the mistakes.  

Part 7: Hand-in your document via email

Send your file via email. If you are using Word, just send the .doc. If you are using latex, send a PDF and the .tex file. 

Last modified: Thursday, October 28, 2004