Informatics Design Cycle
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Domains
Engineering (ISE, systems)
Humanities / Policy / Ethics
Design / Information / UX
Ask Questions
(Problem-framing)
Define Problem
(Scope & Requirements)
Imagine
(Brainstorm Ideas)
Develop & Test
(Solutions)
Improve
(How did this work? How can we make it better?)
Collect Information Activities
- User & field research (ethnography, interviews, surveys)
- Literature & domain review (digital humanities)
- Data acquisition & wrangling (data engineering, web scraping, APIs)
- Knowledge organization (ontologies, knowledge graphs)
- Ethics, law & policy review (IRB, privacy, accessibility)
Ask Questions Activities
- Problem framing & research questions (HCI, design research)
- Theories & constructs (psychology, sociology, economics)
- Hypotheses & measures (statistics, causal inference)
- Stakeholder & power mapping (policy, STS)
Define Problem Activities
- Requirements engineering & use cases
- Risk & threat modeling (security, privacy)
- Value-sensitive & responsible design (ethics, equity)
- Feasibility & systems architecture
- Accessibility & inclusion (UDL, disability studies)
Imagine Activities
- Ideation & participatory design (co-creation, storyboarding)
- Algorithmic approaches (AI/ML, optimization, IR)
- Data modeling (databases, visualization, knowledge representation)
- Prototyping (hardware/embedded, robotics)
- Speculative/critical design, futures thinking
Develop & Test Activities
- Software engineering (frontend/backend, mobile, cloud)
- DevOps/MLOps & reproducibility
- Embedded/IoT systems & robotics
- Usability testing, heuristic evals, A/B tests
- Security, privacy & compliance testing
Improve Activities
- Evaluation & impact assessment (stats, field trials, SNA)
- Fairness, accountability, transparency, interpretability
- Monitoring & reliability (SRE, telemetry)
- Post-deployment research (ethnography, diary studies)
- Iteration, backlog & roadmap (product/change mgmt)
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