The Humboldt County Switchboard provides a resource guide for community and social services in Humboldt County. Community members may access information either via a 'warm line' or an online website providing a database accessible to the community as a resource guide for community and social services. The existing infrastructure, however, made queries slow and future expansion difficult. A redesign of the switchboard's architecture was the objective of this project, and what resulted was an extensible, future-proof design that utilized current collaboration and database technologies (such as HTTP, XML, SOAP, and SQL) and established architectural patterns. As well, several alternatives were compared and some groundwork implementation was completed.

During the conceptual design at the early stage of the design process, sketching is a primary exploration and representation tool. All designers sketch their ideas in some manner, be it in architecture, music, film, art, and a host of other creative disciplines. Software design, however, has a relative dearth of sketching tools and techniques. The goal of this project was to study sketching as it occurs in various creative endeavors, find a way to apply it to software design, and begin implementation. An informed framework was constructed that supports sketching in a software tool, and a variety of implementation options were detailed.

A significant component of a Science of Design for software-intensive systems is the human-computer interface (HCI). While many studies and interface guidelines have established some standard practices, few frameworks exist for incorporating considerations of interface design into software engineering; rather, such decisions are typically an after-thought. This project established an inspiring cyclic design process that incorporates HCI concerns in every design decision. Borrowing from artistic design theory, in this process previously-held assumptions are challenged, reversed, and synthesized with existing design decisions, a process which ensures creative, well-thought interface designs.

In typical software engineering practice, many design artifacts are stored: source code, documentation, bug reports, and so on. In addition, often all changes to these artifacts are also recorded, in what is known as a version-control system. However, most processes fail to track design decisions, such as how implementation details were decided upon, how bugs were fixed, and how requirements evolved. While this difficiency requires solid software implementations to support such tracking, the goal of this project was to engineer an efficient, effective and easy-to-use process of recording and tracking design decisions. The researchers additionally provided mockups for a reference software implementation.