Capstone - Informatics Culminating Projects

The Capstone event showcases the breadth of skills and expertise students develop in the Bachelor of Science in Informatics and Master of Science in Information Management programs. In their poster and oral presentations of their culminating projects, students demonstrate how they have been using information as a tool for transformation in their personal, academic and professional lives.

In their Capstone projects students identify an information problem in a real-world setting and develop the means to address it. Capstone projects can be research-oriented or design-oriented. Solutions are typically interactive, meaning the end product is something that can be implemented and used.

The capstone experience is student-directed, meaning that students take responsibility for:

• Identifying the problem they will address
• Developing the approach used to address the problem
• Carrying out the investigation
• Presenting their findings

Capstone project collaborators include organizations from the public, private and non-profit sectors, and each project represents a concrete example of what it means to design and build novel applications of technology that meet the needs of people. With projects ranging from building social networking applications to improving services for homeless youth to supporting more efficient mass transit, Capstone projects reflect the many ways students at the UW iSchool make information work.

Recent Capstones

Urban Archives: Building a Dedicated Search Interface
Jessie Shulman

The Urban Archives Project is a collection of images including graffiti and other forms of public art in the University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections. The archive sought to develop a repository of research-caliber data that adheres to high metadata standards.

The need to share a template with 80 other project archives presented a number of usability hurdles for the interface and navigational controls. By developing a dedicated search tool on the project’s external site, the student created a customized search interface as well as specific Help documentation. Usability testing was conducted throughout the project.

Merge: Merging People Together
Daryl Lacanlale, Binh Nguyen, Boris Unigovskiy

The Merge web application is a social network that communicates with other social networks. Through numerous interviews with potential Merge users in Needs Assessment, Design and Evaluation stages, the design team developed a functional specification for an improved user interface that encompasses the core features of a social network and improves on usability and privacy, while providing more user control.