Iterative Design of a Project Charter
In 2008, my colleague Dr. Stan Ruecker and I published a paper that described our experience with the iterative development and use of a project charter for helping to manage expectations of the various members of interdisciplinary research teams. The paper was based on our experiences working with over a dozen interdisciplinary teams. The charter is based on the need to explicitly discuss principles and policies of research practice with people from different disciplines at the start of the project, and to have a common agreement to refer to if necessary during the project. Our current template contains the following principles: Since then, we’ve worked together and independently on 90+ teams and, in 2019, we updated the Charter to reflect our experiences (see Design and the Digital Humanities, 2022). We also created a Project Charter Template that’s free to use, modify, and distribute (with credit back to us as appropriate).
Mapping Student Journeys to Mental Health Support
2026— The goal of this project is to better understand how students access and navigate mental health supports offered through Wellness Services at Mount Royal University. The Project Team will use journey mapping as a tool to explore and reflect on the steps a person takes when moving through on-campus mental health services, locating key moments, service touch points, and emotional impacts. What we learn from this project will help identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities for improving access to mental health supports at MRU. This project is a collaboration between faculty and students in the Department of Information Design and a team from Wellness Services at Mount Royal University, including: Dr. Naureen Mumtaz and Dr. Milena Radzikowska (faculty) and Sophie Madsen (2nd year student) and Andrea Le (4th year student) in the Department of Information Design).
TAPoR
TAPoR was originally created to be a directory only of tools used for text analysis, but it has evolved to its current iteration where it includes a far greater range of tools including code snippets that can do the work of tools. In 2018 TAPoR absorbed the DiRT project (Digital Research Tools) and now includes tools that work on non-textual data and tools that provide services used by digital humanists. This evolution largely reflects that of the field of digital humanities, and the collection includes the following categories of tools:
Capta by Juxtaposition: a Rich-Prospect Approach to the Visualization of Interpretation Project
2020— In her seminal essay, Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display, Johanna Drucker points out that visualization design for the humanities has still not properly accommodated the nature of humanities scholarship. Given, as she says, that all data is actually capta, current approaches to data visualization are misleading in that they suggest more certainty and stability than is actually the case. Her proposal is, therefore, to revise the format of the framework of the visualization so that, for example, the x and y axis on a cartesian grid are no longer divided into uniform increments. In our project, we take up Drucker’s challenge by adopting a rich prospect approach, where the visualization consists of panels of displays, each of which provides a different insight based on a selected perspective on the capta. As a case study, we show how diagrams of the design process can accommodate a broader range of theoretical perspectives than is typically made visible, using only subtle differences in the image. Each choice is placed in a panel, and the panels are then gathered together for the purposes of comparison, analysis, and discussion. Although there are dozens of design process models (Dubberly 2005), we are not interested in
Design for Peace & Reconciliation Project
2019— Colombia, a country on the North-Western corner of South America, has been facing certain critical challenges—after a 50-year civil war, many Colombians are left suffering the effects of living in a post-conflict zone and the consequences of the displacement of over 3 million persons, and the death of 220,000, with 4 out of the 5 deaths non-combatant civilians. Through the Design and Community Innovation Workshop (TaDIC), stakeholders are hoping to use design methods to imagine a better future for themselves, their communities, and their country. In 2019, my colleagues and I had the immense privilege of joining the TaDIC team in Tumaco, Colombia, for three weeks of innovation and collaboration between local elders; community, business, and education leaders; students from across Colombia; volunteer participants; and UNAL organizers. Together, we worked to achieve shared outcomes—peace and well being for Colombia—through the design and execution of design prototypes. The physical, mental, and emotional proximity served as a metaphor for the larger process of reconciliation, with shared artifacts acting as tangible reminders that cooperation can result in mutual benefit. Connecting Colombians & Canadians Events Although 6400 km apart, Colombia and Canada share many concerns. We want our children to be healthy and
A Speculative Feminist Approach to Project Management Project
2019 We applied a speculative feminist approach to the design of software for project management. As we interpret it, speculative feminist design in human-computer interaction (HCI) demonstrates attention to the following six principles (as defined by Radzikowska, 2015): challenging the status quo; designing for an actionable ideal; searching out the invisible; considering the micro, meso, and macro; privileging transparency; and welcoming critique. In the context of project management, our approach to software design has therefore included the following priorities: all stakeholders have goals, but not necessarily shared goals; the line between an internal deliverable and an external project outcome is blurred; impacts can occur immediately or decades later; impact assessment methods need to be explicit in the project planning system. In adopting the terms speculative feminism and critical feminism, we intend that our work be understood as situated within the territory of Critical Theory as applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School. We introduced our design, called It’s a Wicked World (IWW), as an example, although it is only the current iteration of one part of a larger, ongoing project. Team M. Radzikowska, J. Roberts-Smith, X. Zhou, and S. Ruecker. Where it’s been published/presented Radzikowska, M., Roberts-Smith, J., Zhou,
Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE)
2009—2016 The international INKE Research Project consisted of 35 researchers across 20 institutions and 21 partner agencies, with work involving some 19 postdoctoral research fellows and 53 graduate research assistants over the life of the project. Directed by Ray Siemens (U Victoria), its work in 2016 was led by Siemens, Stan Ruecker (IIT Institute of Design), Jon Bath (U Saskatchewan), and Jon Saklofske (Acadia U); past leaders have also included Richard Cunningham (Acadia U), Teresa Dobson (U British Columbia), Alan Galey (U Toronto), and Claire Warwick (University College, London). The project was funded by a $2.5 million, 7-year Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), plus an additional $10.4 million in contributions from institutional and research partners. INKE sought to understand the future of reading and the book through a historical perspective by bringing together researchers and stakeholders at the forefront of computing in the humanities, text analysis, information studies, usability, and interface design into a network comprised of those who are best-poised to understand the nature of the human record as it intersects with the computer. INKE began in 2004 as HCI-Book: Human-Computer Interface and the Electronic Book, a Strategic Research Cluster supported by SSHRC shortly
Design for Manufacturing Decision Support
2009—2015 What should 21st century interfaces used in oil production look like? When plant managers use software to make decisions, what factors should they consider? Should we design interfaces that include the quantitative and the qualitative experiences of the decision-makers? Considering decision support through the lenses of critical and feminist theories suggests novel approaches to the design of human-computer interfaces. Treating interfaces as cultural objects, or in Derrida’s terms a “text” that can be read and reread analyzed provides us with valuable insights into how these interfaces may, subsequently, be read and understood by their users. How to build a better HCI Challenge what we currently consider critical constraints within the decision-making process: include not just parts and materials, but also people (individuals, groups, and communities), environments (machines, working spaces, surrounding spaces, and electronic spaces), and processes (steps, time, decisions, upsets, consequences, factors, communications, relationships, and dependencies). This project culminated in a set of principles for feminist human-computer interface (HCI) design that have, subsequently, been adopted and expanded by the qCollaborative—a feminist design research lab housed at the University of Illinois, University of Waterloo, and Mount Royal University. Challenge existing practices. Aim towards an actionable ideal future. Look for what has been
Information Visualization for Humanities Scholars Project
2004—2013 Information visualization for humanities scholars needs to accommodate a mix of evidence and argumentation. The humanities approach consists not of converging toward a single interpretation that cannot be challenged but rather of examining the objects of study from as many reasonable and original perspectives as possible to develop convincing interpretations (for a fuller argumentation of this approach in a digital context, see Drucker). In this sense, we can evaluate a visualization system by determining how well it supports this interpretive activity: a visualization that produces a single output for a given body of material is of limited usefulness; a visualization that provides many ways to interact with the data, viewed from different perspectives, is better; a visualization that contributes to new and emergent ways of understanding the material is best. Read the full paper here: Sinclair, S., Ruecker, S. and M. Radzikowska. “Information Visualization for Humanities Scholars.” In Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology. MLA Commons, 2013.