Assignment 2
Design in Other Fields
Due 1/14

Students are responsible for writing a short paper and giving a presentation on design from some field other than Computing. The field does not have to a formal discipline. For example, flower arrangement, printer fonts, crossword puzzles, and major league baseball schedules all qualify. A formal discipline is also acceptable. Nuclear power plants, landscape architecture, and the structure of sonatas all qualify. Both the paper and the presentation should covering the following topics.

1. A description of the area/problem space; what are the significant issues/tradeoffs that are normally addressed?
2. What is the conventional/most common design method or process used?
3. What representation techniques are commonly used?
4. How are designs normally validated?
5. A comprehensive example should be used throughout the discussion. That is, the example should be typical of the problem space, it should be illustrative of the method, the solution should be expressed using the representation techniques, and the validation techniques should point out the kinds of problems that may arise with the solution.

Example topics that have been used in the past include the following. You are strongly encouraged to pick a new topic-something that tweaks your curiosity or something that you have personal experience with.

• Design theory in combinatorics
• Curriculum design in middle schools
• Monitoring systems for nuclear power plants
• Parking garages
• Product line production runs for men's slacks
• Plastic surgery
• The structure and evolution of natural languages
• The layout of newspaper pages
• Bicycles
• Golf courses
• Airport runways
• Power grids
• Haiku
• Swords
• Bonsai
• Dinner parties
• Beer
  

You should work in teams of four or five students. If you have an idea for a topic, you should use the newsgroup to advertise for teammates. (If your team has four students, I may add a fifth if there are students who cannot find a team of four.) Create a Swiki page for your team hung off of the Assignments/Assignment2 Swiki page. Give your team a name, list the team members, provide links to each of the personal Swiki pages for your team members, provide a link for your presentation slides, and provide a link to your report. Papers should be no more than seven pages in length including any diagrams and illustrations.

All turnins for this and all other class assignments should be printable. This means text, html, pdf, gif, or jpeg are fine, as long as the file tags are standard mime types. MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats are prohibited as are the proprietary SAVE formats for any UML tools you use.

Presentations will be given on January 14th as well. The presentation should be given by a single person. (During the course of the term, each student should give at least one presentation.) The presentation should be no more than seven minutes in length, strictly enforced. Please target five (non-title) slides: one each for the five topics listed above.

One member from each team should send me an email by Saturday, January 10th containing your topic area and your team members. Please do not send this email until you have recruited your full team.

Note that although you are encouraged to find answers to the questions listed above on the Internet, I expect the reports to be written by you and not pasted from a website. With respect to the fifth item, the comprehensive example, you are welcome to include diagrams and other information from the web if you properly cite it.