We decided to split the content of the project plan between us. Luckily, we already had a task plan in place, which made a lot of the work easier. We each took sections of the task plan to describe in more detail, as well as sections of the rest of the paper. This included things like what we wanted to accomplish with our future research, our target audience, and what we envisioned the outcome of the project to be.

Looking back, having to think about resources for each task, as well as the reason for doing each task, was very helpful in focusing our future work goals and how to accomplish them. While this seems like an obviously good thing to do in most task planning exercises, there is nothing like having the first-hand experience of trying to accomplish a task and realizing you forgot something or that it didn’t have the outcome you were hoping for. At least this way we have a better idea of what we need to do in order to make progress on this capstone, and why. Creating this task plan also made us newly aware of deadlines and the amount of work each of us would have to contribute, in a good way. The task plan really gave us a physical reminder of our goals and the road ahead.

The task plan also served to illustrate just how important clear tasks, goals, and deadlines are to the overall design process. We were able of separate sections of the task plan into stages of the design process, such as exploration and ideation or design and refinement. It also allowed us to see just how those stages transitioned, and the way in which the tasks of one stage affected the tasks in another stage.

You can download and read the first revision of our project proposal here: 6-30 Project Plan and Proposal.pdf