iSchool Capstone

Award Winner

2016

Vision Zero Dashboard & Interactive Map Tool

As part of Seattle’s ongoing mission to improve traffic safety, the Seattle Department of Transportation adopted the initiative Vision Zero, a plan to end traffic-related deaths and serious injuries by 2030. While Vision Zero’s progress is closely monitored internally by SDOT and other government officials, there is currently a lack of data made available to the general public. Our Capstone project aims to solve this problem. Our solution is composed of an information-driven dashboard that shows Seattle’s high-level traffic collision trends as well as an interactive map tool that allows users to view aggregated and individual collisions with specific collision details. It is our hope that the information presented by our project will not only provide traffic enthusiasts the necessary data they desire but also inform Seattleites on traffic statistics so they can become safer commuters. With everyone’s help, we can reach our goal by 2030 and Seattle can truly live up to being one of the safest cities in the country.

We The People: Empowerment Through Design

The Indian Judicial System has an unfavorable public image. Layers of organizational, procedural and administrative intricacies pose challenges for citizens, around discoverability and consumability of legal information. Out of over 75 judicial websites that currently exist, over 90% are outdated, poorly designed, and lack a consistent structure, further impacting the trustworthiness of the system. 67% of citizens are more likely to trust their government if it is accessible online (Deloitte, e-Governance 2015). However, citizens require more than an online presence; they need a judicial system to be a beacon of trust, efficiency and consistency. Our team has used Design Science Research methodology to transform traditional approaches towards designing judicial portals. Using National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission of India as a case-in-point, we have redesigned their website by changing the underlying information architecture, redefining content strategy and employing an empathic design pattern. Our contribution to the cause of better jurisprudence is a knowledge artifact - an academic paper outlining a scalable and repeatable process that can be used to develop or re-design any judicial portal. Through this project, we will equip governments with a framework for bridging information gaps in digital governance and improve public perception through value-driven, citizen-centered design.

What Do We Have, Where Is It, And What Do We Want?: Making Hillel UW’s Jewish Library Accessible Again

Hillel UW maintains a small library (currently roughly 1600 volumes), but lacked any inventory record or formal policies. Our team used LibraryThing to catalog the collection and create a searchable online catalog with bibliographic information, subject tags, and appropriate classification, while reorganizing and weeding the collection as we went. We also worked with Hillel staff to draft a collection development policy that formalized the library’s subject scope, gift policy, and criteria for future collection building and weeding. Together, the catalog and reorganization improve access to the collection for those who wish to use the library as a research resource and for Hillel staff and community members’ daily needs. The collection development policy provides a formalized statement of procedural expectations for staff working with the library, which will increase the consistency of their application and clarify library needs for staff and members of the public interested in contributing to the library.

Wiki for Woodhaven

Woodhaven is a neighborhood with a rich history in the New York City borough of Queens. In 2008 the Woodhaven Cultural and Historical Society created a community wiki but within a year it fell into disuse. Due to recently increased interest in local history, including a library-driven "memory project" and a middle school history club, the organization was eager to make the wiki more accessible to the community. My project consisted of reorganizing the wiki with linking and tagging, publishing guidelines for editing and submitting articles, and using those guidelines to create new example articles. The recent uptick in interest demands an accessible tool where community members can share acquired knowledge of the area’s history and culture. Knowledge of local history enriches the experiences of both communities and individuals alike. This project will help facilitate increased community awareness and sharing of local history by providing an easy to use platform.

Youth Library: NAVOS Mental Health Solutions

NAVOS Mental Health Solutions, a nonprofit established in 1966, is one of the largest providers of mental health services in the King County area. In September 2015, NAVOS opened a newly remodeled facility: the NAVOS Behavioral Healthcare Center for Children, Youth & Families. This center focuses on vulnerable children and youth, providing a broad level of care at both the inpatient and outpatient level. Our project is focused on building a library for the inpatient youth of NAVOS. Working with over 1,500 previously donated books, we cataloged, labeled, and organized the collection so that users can better access the library’s resources. Additionally, we worked to create a welcoming and engaging library environment, including recommended reads lists, a tabletop game area, and a space for youth to display their art. We designed the library to be more functional and participatory so that residents have a space to call their own.

2015

A Fistful of Floppies: Digital Preservation in Action

The University of Washington Library system currently holds a small collection of electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) accompanying materials from the late 1980’s to 2011 on floppy disks and CD-Rs. These materials will soon reach or have already exceeded the limit of their expected lifespans. This project looked at the digital preservation possibilities for this collection of materials using digital forensics as a model. Working with Preservation Services staff, a workflow using industry standard best practices and open source software was developed and implemented. Each item in the collection was forensically imaged, analyzed, documented and packaged for eventual preservation in the Universities’ online repository. A full inventory of remaining thesis materials on physical media in the library collection was also created and a digital preservation computer station with the BitCurator forensic environment was installed in Preservation Services for future projects.

Achilles

The $30 billion physical therapy (PT) industry is projected to grow 7% annually (HarrisWilliams&Co.). Despite this growth, current PT practices often leverage low-tech guidance, involve minimal patient-therapist communication, and do not provide a means for accountability. The PT industry is on the rise, and it’s time for PT technology to catch up. So, how do we help physical therapists serve their patients while guiding and motivating patients to get better faster? The answer is Achilles, a fully customizable physical therapy application that amplifies the patient-therapist relationship to provide guidance and motivation throughout the rehabilitation process. The therapist interface provides consistent insights into patients’ at-home progress as provided by the patient interface, effectively bridging the gap between office visits. Achilles augments the physical therapy experience and in turn, patients are able to better manage their injuries and get better faster.

Adapt

What do you want to accomplish today? This week? This month? We all have goals, but finding the best method or technique to achieve those goals can be a challenge. Our world is littered with conflicting information about self-improvement; sifting through it is time-consuming and confusing. We want to help people achieve their goals. That is why we built an application to crowd-source this process for our users. Adapt is a social platform for individuals looking to share and test ideas for self-improvement. Once a user has tested a hypothesis, they can report back to the community and share their findings. This data will then be aggregated and analyzed to help users find the most effective and efficient means of increasing performance and accomplishing personal goals.

Advertising Budget Recommendation Model

94% of consumers research cars online before purchasing, and about a third willing to buy a car online. CDK Global’ s digital advertising department makes online marketing easy for vehicle dealers by budgeting and handling digital advertisement to increase customer reach and sales. We have focused on improving their budgeting process with an efficient and accurate model that improves transparency and customer satisfaction. We used predictive analysis to develop a model using Google AdWords, market demand and vehicle sales data for a particular Marketing Area to give a sophisticated budget proposal. This model will give insight into the top selling car models for a dealer and the amount of dollars the dealer needs to spend to advertise those models. The Advertising Analysts will be able to use this model to derive detailed performance of a client in a quicker and precise fashion, increasing the overall efficiency of the budgeting process.

America and the Race to the Moon

Using images, moving pictures, documents, and narrative stories, our team has created an engaging digital exhibition in Omeka, an online digital collections management system, for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). This project explores the history of the Space Race between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from the launch of Sputnik I in 1957 through the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969. Team members addressed copyright issues, gained permissions as needed, and developed metadata according to Dublin Core standards. Since the DPLA is an aggregation of digital objects from partnering institutions all over the country, our project aimed to curate digital objects exemplifying a theme of national importance. In doing so, we hope to engage an audience of scholars, students, and all those who may wish to learn more about this evocative period in time.