Sean Munson's Research Group Archive

This page contains an archive of the past five years of Directed Research Groups led by Professor Munson. View his currently offered DRGs »

Spring 2025

Designing Healthy Eating Futures for Latinx Adolescents

Instructors: Carla Castillo, PhD Student & HCDE Sean Munson, Professor, HCDE

This DRG will help conduct a research study to understand the current behavior of Latinx families—parents and adolescents—and their goals/needs around eating, and to develop intervention concepts where design might support desired eating behaviors. The study consists of a food diary, interviews, co-design workshops, and a survey to gather feedback on intervention concepts.

This research will be conducted with the Latinx population in the Lower Yakima Valley. Students are not expected to travel to the site but will assist in planning study activities by:

Qualitative coding transcripts
Refining co-design workshop activities
Reviewing literature and existing interventions or programs to develop intervention cards on current approaches for teens to review and assess

Winter – Spring 2025

Co-speculating Care-ful Data Infrastructures with Home Child Care Workers

Instructors: Neilly Tan, Sean Munson, Audrey Desjardins (on leave)

Smart home cameras' varied promises–to increase security, care, and convenience–belie critical tensions about social configurations of power, surveillance, and privacy in home settings.

This DRG addresses the impacts of data-driven monitoring with labor conditions in domestic spaces. With a specific focus around the experiences of nannies and other in-home child care workers, this research group explores the following questions:

What are alternative structures for collective accountability around critical technology use?
How can values of care and interdependence inform privacy in domestic labor contexts?

Across two quarters (Winter and Spring 2025), students will develop and co-facilitate a participatory, speculative design research workshop with in-home child care workers. Ultimately, this hands-on DRG will result in the co-creation of design resource materials (e.g., zines, manifestos, booklets) that engage specific applications of consent, negotiation, and disclosure around varied social settings and audiences. Through this process, students will contribute to both practical and theoretical implications of privacy.

This research group will cover the following broad agenda:

Winter quarter: Students will closely read across design research methods and theory, creating and crafting workshop protocols alongside this foundational knowledge. During this time, students will also assist in participant recruitment, running pilot workshops, and developing community relationships.
Depending on study progress, students can expect to co-facilitate the design workshop by the end of Winter quarter or beginning of Spring quarter.
Spring quarter: Following the design workshop's completion, students will collaborate on data analysis and creating design materials.

Students should apply with the expectation of a two-quarter commitment. However, we understand that other priorities–such as spring quarter course conflicts–could prevent some individuals from returning in spring.

Winter 2025

Leveraging role-playing games to support mental health

Instructors:

Sean Munson
Georgia Kenderova
Nisha Devasia

Description:
Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) can be leveraged to help build social and emotional skills and support mental health by fostering empathy, building community, and providing a safe space for experimentation and identity play.

In this DRG, we will read and become acquainted with literature on game-based learning, such as games for learning social and emotional skills (with a focus on developing mental health skills), game narrative design, narrative immersion, learning and behavioral change theories, and other related topics. Ideally, we will also look at multiple existing RPG systems, RPG mechanics, campaigns/storylines, and play and analyze a few of those games to aid our understanding of how they function and inform the design of a future study.

Outcomes:

Reading and discussing academic literature; learning about how games can support building social and emotional skills and mental health.
Contribute to the design of a research study (e.g., scoping research questions, research sketches, etc.).
Understand how immersive narratives and game mechanics work and opportunity to create ones ourselves.

Autumn 2024

Designing Healthy Eating Futures for Latinx Adolescents

Instructors:

Carla Castillo, PhD Student, HCDE
Sean Munson, Professor, HCDE

This research will be conducted with the Latinx population in the Lower Yakima Valley. Students are not expected to travel to the site but will assist in planning and conducting study activities by:

Conducting a literature review
Reviewing food diary data
Conducting remote interviews with participants
Analyzing collected data
Refining co-design workshops activities
Developing storyboards of the most promising intervention concepts

Not all students are expected to support each task; tasks may be assigned to certain students based on their preferences and abilities.

Autumn 2024

Designing Measurement Reading Group

Instructors: Nichole Sams, Sean Munson and Brittany Blanchard

This DRG will explore designing equitable and usable social science measurements. We will read articles weekly, documenting heuristics of measurement design, critiques of inequitable foundational practices, and create a Zine/presentation to share understanding elements of measurement, how to evaluate measurements for research design goals, procedure for designing measurement. The group can use information to decide the final audience for zine/presentation.

The materials we will be primarily using will be largely sourced from mental health outcomes and health implementation science measures.

Autumn 2024

UW ALACRITY Center Website Redesign

Instructors:

Tricia Aung (PhD student)
Sean Munson (Professor)

The UW Advanced Laboratories for Accelerating the Reach and Impact of Treatments for Youth and Adults with Mental Illness Center (UWAC) is a multidisciplinary team of experts from mental health, implementation science (IS), and human-centered design (HCD) focused on overcoming obstacles that prevent quality mental health interventions from reaching historically marginalized groups. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, UWAC supports projects with improving the usability, engagement, and appropriateness of evidence-based clinical interventions and implementation strategies in diverse and non-specialty settings (e.g., rural, urban, low-income, primary care, schools). UWAC is in its second round of funding (2023-2028), and the project has generated numerous resources and findings, which has positioned UWAC as a leader in leveraging IS and HCD approaches. There is a critical need to improve the UWAC website’s information architecture and usability for users and UWAC team.

The goal of this DRG is to redesign the UWAC website to better meet diverse user and dissemination needs. The website currently features UWAC-developed resources and presentations, highlights project accomplishments, and announces requests for proposals. We would like to improve the website to better meet user needs and highlight UWAC’s growing work.

Proposed steps:

Develop an understanding of existing content on the existing UWAC website. Create an inventory of all content/sitemap on the existing website.
Conduct heuristic usability evaluation of existing website.
Focus group discussions, interviews, and/or survey to discuss information needs. We would like to gather information from UWAC team members (e.g., Admin Core, Methods Core), project investigators (e.g., current and potential small pilot project applicants, research assistants), advisory board, and external investigators that have requested resources from UWAC.
Collate from UWAC team members existing content (e.g., papers, guides, presentations) for the website.
Lead card sorting session with UWAC team members to categorize content and develop a content hierarchy.
Create new site map and user flows.
Develop clickable wireframe prototypes.
Conduct usability testing with users on prototypes.
Make initial changes in Wordpress based on prototypes.

Winter 2024

Decolonizing Mental Health and Beyond: Building mental wellness with community assets

This DRG aims to explore and discover concepts of community mental health and wellness engagement, tools, and artifacts that center the needs of members of the [HCDE? DUB? University?- to be shaped by who joins] community, include those who may not be familiar with mental health services, who could benefit from support and resources for their mental health and wellness. Through a decolonial lens, we will examine what could exist independently and interact with traditional healthcare models and technologies.

We will engage in the Discover and Design aspects of the Discover, Design/Build and Test (DDBT) model by Lyon, Munson et al, and using Pendse’s From Treatment to Healing: Envisioning a Decolonial Digital Mental Health as a guide for our work.

We will do this work while focusing on the UW Student community- understanding what gaps exist and explore the design space for creating mental health engagement on our own campus and within our departments.

Outcome

We will host a short informal mental health & wellness showcase conversation, where we share our learnings and low-fidelity (simple mockups) of our ideas.

Planned activities

Ground setting: Collecting, Reading and sharing relevant literature across disciplines
Refinement of Interview questions and guides
Qualitative (open-ended questions) Interview & Analysis Training
Qualitative interviews with your peers

Required availability

This DRG is designed as a 2-credit
- 2 hours in person discussions
- 4 hours of independent reading, research and/or interviews
  - If you have extenuating circumstances and you would like to register for a different amount of credits- please share the details in the google form
Attend one two-hour discussion/ideation session each week
- Schedule TBD
- Preferably in person- but some hybrid options circumstantially
Work 4 hours outside of class each week engaging in materials or collecting data
Available to recruit your peers to participate in qualitative interviews.

Skills

Growth Mindset
Communicative & authentic
Curious, excited about following non-traditional learning paths
Passionate about supporting mental health in a campus community, with a focus on support for people who have historically been marginalized

This DRG will be led by PhD student Nichole Sams with guidance from HCDE Professor Sean Munson.

Winter 2024

Everyday Sensor Sharing: Reimagine location sharing / Speculating about the future of digital technology

The widespread use of smartphones, location trackers, and GPS-based apps has led to the generation of highly precise geographic location data. While this leads to benefits for users and the companies, it also raises ethical questions. For example, misuse can evolve into severe power abuse and surveillance struggles in current and future everyday life. Thus, it affects interpersonal tensions, social dynamics, and relationships. Yet, little design research has explored how location data is being used as a material for design and can be used for design of social and collaborative systems.

Therefore, this DRG aims to foster a craft-based design research process. By engaging in different design activities we will explore different avenues and perspectives of how location sharing could be integrated into people’s everyday lives. The outcome of this DRG will ideally be one or a series of artifact (s).

Planned activities

Become familiar with what location data “is” as a resource for design: how it can be materialized, worked with, and its limits.
We will follow principles of participatory design and design ethnography to explore how location sharing is currently implemented in people’s everyday lives.
Design outcome: design proposals or other artifacts.

Required availability

Attend our 2-hour class each week:
Work 4 to 6 hours each week outside of meetings
Winter quarter: January 3 - March 4, 2024

Skills

Any design skills welcome (e.g., UX/UI design, graphic design, IxD, industrial design, etc.)
Research skills: User research/testing, ethnographic research methods

This DRG will be led by PhD student Claire Florence Weizenegger with guidance from Assistant Professor James Pierce (Art + Art History + Design) and Professor Sean Munson (HCDE).

Autumn 2023

Mapping Collective Visions for Tech Workers in the aftermath of the 2022-2023 Tech Layoffs

Led by Samuel So, PhD student (HCDE)
With guidance from HCDE professors Sucheta Ghoshal and Sean Munson

Overview:
By early 2023, several big tech companies, such as Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Intel, announced layoffs that would impact up to 100,000 people. Company leadership justified these decisions as the result of lowered sales and preemptive measures in anticipation of an economic recession. The current wave of layoffs comes at a time when tech workers are increasingly critical of their employers’ values and practices. The designers, engineers, and other techworkers in the workforce have an increasingly conflicted relationship with the managerial class within Big Tech, particularly with corporate leadership that gets to define the goals and visions of this industry. As a result, many of them are actively seeking out newer means of accountability within and outside the workplace.

As the next phase of this NSF-supported project, we will investigate the emergent relationships tech workers have with their employers, their value systems, and potential modes of accountability in the aftermath of the layoffs. In this 2-credit DRG, we will recruit for- and conduct an 8-week asynchronous remote communities (ARC) research study involving recently laid off tech workers. DRG students will facilitate ARC activities and qualitatively analyze participant responses.

For more information on the study, please refer to the HCDE website.

We are looking for:

2-3 graduate students (MS or PhD), or upper-level undergraduate students in their 3rd+ year
No prior software development experience necessary
- No experience with qualitative data analysis software necessary
Folks with qualitative data collection and analysis experience (e.g., interviews, surveys, focus groups, ARCs)
Interest in technocultural analysis, labor studies, and/or CSCW research, theory, and methods

DRG Format and Expectations:

Attend two weekly meetings: 75-minute research group meeting and 90 minute co-working session. Times TBD (see survey)
Work on the DRG outside of scheduled meeting times for 3 hours
Graded credit/no-credit for 2 credits (3 hours per credit = e.g., 3 hours of meetings + 3 hours of outside work = 2 CR)

Students in the DRG will:

Co-create, workshop, facilitate, and monitor weekly ARC activities with participants
Collect participant data and write observational memos based on participants’ weekly responses
Collaborate on qualitative data analysis through grounded theory open-coding and research memos

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Samuel So via email (samuelso@uw.edu) or HCDE Slack.

Winter 2023

Landscape analysis of human centered design methods for improved nutrition outcomes

Led by: Tricia Aung, PhD student (HCDE)
With guidance from faculty advisor, Sean Munson (HCDE)

Overview:
Human centered design (HCD) is increasingly used in global health, however, these projects are commonly led by individuals in high-income countries. The current movement towards decolonizing global health highlights how systematic limited participation of low- and middle-income country experts and affected communities in designing health solutions and setting research agendas perpetuates inequities. With the launch of Tanzania’s new National Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Action Plan, the Government of Tanzania is committed to addressing the triple burden of malnutrition through increased community engagement and multi-sectoral research. There is an opportunity to apply HCD methods to innovate context-appropriate solutions that tackle nutrition issues across the lifecycle. In partnership with the Tanzania Food and Nutrition Centre (TFNC)—the Government of Tanzania’s lead in nutrition policy and research—we will be laying a foundation for a HCD-trained hub within TFNC. We aspire for this hub to lead initiatives that leverage HCD methods to create context-appropriate, community-informed solutions to priority nutrition issues.

In this DRG, we will conduct a landscape analysis of the use of: (1) HCD to improve global health and nutrition outcomes in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including Tanzania; and (2) HCD in Tanzania. This will be a collaborative literature review paired with discussion on how the identified case studies define HCD, types of methods used, positionality, strengths, and weaknesses. The output of this DRG will be: (1) a database that systematically organizes findings (examples: Personal Informatics Paper Browser, LIVE Dashboard); and (2) a paper for peer-review. Participants of the DRG will be eligible for paper authorship if meeting ICMJE criteria for authorship. Findings from the landscape analysis will ultimately be used to develop customized curriculum to develop the TFNC HCD hub.

We are looking for:

5-7 students (undergraduate or graduate)
Interest in or experience with HCD and nutrition in LMICs
Relevant coursework (e.g. HCDE 318, 419, 502) helpful but not required

Attend 1 hour weekly meetings (dates/time TBD)
Work on the DRG outside of scheduled meeting times, 3 hours per credit.
Graded credit/no-credit for 2-3 total credits. (e.g., 3 hours of meetings/study sessions + 6 hours of outside work = 3 CR)

Students in the DRG will:

Collaborate on literature review and outputs.
Expand understanding of how HCD methods are applied in LMIC nutrition and Tanzania contexts.

Autumn 2022

Speculative Engagements with Post-mortem Digital Legacies

Led by: Samuel So, PhD student (HCDE)
With guidance from faculty advisor, Sean Munson (HCDE)

Personal data play increasingly prominent roles in everyday life, as people continue to produce, share, and manage their data in the form of photos, texts, documents, and other digital media. But what happens to our data after we die? And how will this data be used to remember, commemorate, and honor our lives? In this 2-3 credit DRG, we will investigate the relationships between personal data, identity/self-concept, and post-mortem digital legacies. This research project engages adult dyads who trust each other (e.g., close friends, family members, intimate partners) in a speculative co-design exercise about their post-mortem digital legacies. DRG students will facilitate co-design activities and qualitatively analyze interview and observational data gathered from sessions.