Final Paper

This is the penultimate expression of the design research you have done to this point. I view papers have having four primary goals, depending on the nature of the work. Here are two basic ways of viewing your work, and what you should be trying to include based on these views:

Design

Study

  • What is the problem?
  • What is your approach/solution?
  • How do you evaluate your approach/solution?
  • What is the contribution of your work?
  • What is the question, and why do you ask it?
  • What is your approach/solution?
  • What are your primary findings? What evidence do you have to support them?
  • What do these tell us about technology design?

You'll notice that there is a direct correspondence to the outline!

There are four primary deliverables for this component:

  • A written final paper
  • Two reviews of others' papers
  • Facilitate discussion about the paper
  • Final presentation (20 talk + 10 questions)

Pedagogical Objectives

  1. Develop an understanding of academic paper writing process (through writing, and through critique).
  2. Learn skills for critiquing and reviewing papers, and applying these practice through the process of review writing.
  3. Develop an understanding of the program committee process, and how to develop and summarize others' work in this context.

Submission Instructions

  • Submissions are due on 11/25 before class.
  • Submissions should be in the SIGCHI format.
  • I expect most submissions to be between 6~8 pages, and in PDF form.
  • Nominally, I would expect the following major sections in most of the papers:
    • Abstract
    • Introduction
    • Related Work/Background
    • [Something about your thing -- maybe] -- set up your study somehow
    • Study
    • Findings/Results
    • Discussion
    • Conclusion
    • References
    • Appendices (these do not count against your page count) -- should include things like raw data, the questionnaires or interview questions that you used, etc.
  • You can submit on the EasyChair submission site.

Grading Rubric

As discussed in class, we will use a grading rubric that is very similar to the one used for the proposal. The only extra rows are for "Findings/Results" and "Discussion" -- this is in place of "Proposed Work".

Reviewing

On the evening of 11/25, I will assign each person two other papers to read (via the EasyChair site). Your job is to read the papers, and to write a reviews for each of the papers. Your reviews will be graded on the quality of the feedback, and the even-ness of the tone.

As many of you have not written reviews before, I recommend checking out Nick Feamster's write-up on review writing. I think it is a fantastic resource with some great links.

Biggest key here: remember that someone in the class is going to read your feedback. Be professional, and write it in such a way that you would not be offended to get the feedback yourself.

The reviews are due on 11/29 in the system by 11:59pm.

Program Committee Meeting

On 12/2, we will run a mock programme committee meeting. Our job will be to discuss the relative merits of each paper, and to produce a list of suggested improvements for the authors. Note that this is different from most PC meetings, where the primary goal is to produce a stack-ranking of papers, and to decide which papers "get in" to a conference and which papers get rejected. We won't do this.

To prepare for this committee meeting, you should:

  • Summarize your each of your reviews into a set of major points:
    • What were the major arguments of the paper
    • What were the strengths of the paper
    • What were the weaknesses of the paper
  • Read Nick Feamster's guide to PC meetings

During the committee meeting, we will talk about each paper in turn. I will ask the authors of the paper to leave the room, and we will begin a discussion led by the people who reviewed the paper. There will be four of you who have read it. Your job is to explain each of the major points above to the remaining two committee members. At the conclusion of each discussion, two reviewers will put together a summary of the reviews, and suggested improvements. These will be submitted back to the authors via the system by the end of the week.