NOTE: This is an actual research proposal, based on the Office of Sponsored Research template. If you use this as a base for your own proposal, make sure that you change it appropriately.
My notes to you are highlighted in yellow.
Things you'll need to change are highlighted in green.
Graphic Design and Knowledge Work: A Field Study
Graphic Design and Knowledge Work: A Field Study
Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin
Gail Bayeta, Austin Community College
We seek to answer this research question:
How do graphic designers perform knowledge work? Specifically, how do they create, develop, and use information with people across organizations, such as clients, vendors, and subcontractors?
Knowledge work is work in which the primary product is knowledge, information that is continually interpreted and circulated across organizational boundaries. It tends to be organized in distributed, heterogeneous networks rather than in modular hierarchies such as those Marx described (1990). Whereas modular organization encouraged "silos" with rigid hierarchical separations and few connections, knowledge work encourages proliferating connections across trades, fields, and disciplines, connections across which texts circulate. These connections lead to more flexibility and collaboration within networked organizations, but also more communication problems: workers from historically separated activities suddenly must interact, collaborate, and learn enough of each others' social languages and genres to work together. Complexities become more difficult to manage, and everyone needs to learn a little about everyone else's work.
Knowledge work involves substantial collaboration across boundaries, and consequently it requires horizontal as well as vertical learning. Traditionally, colleges and universities have focused on teaching and learning expertise vertically, in terms of the stages a person passes as she becomes more expert in a specific domain: starting out as a neophyte, then progressively gaining more expertise until she becomes an expert. This focus on vertical learning allows students to gain a deep understanding of their own discipline and to build on the established knowledge of that discipline. This focus on vertical expertise particularly made sense when the majority of students could look forward to lifelong employment in organizations whose units were strictly separated.
But there is also a horizontal dimension to expertise: people must be able to “operate in and move between multiple parallel activity contexts” that “demand and afford different, complementary but also conflicting cognitive tools, rules, and patterns of social interaction” (Engeström, Engeström & Kärkkäinen 1995, p.319). Vertical learning involves crossing field, trade, and disciplinary boundaries in order to collaborate and develop crossfunctional, interlinked work. Horizontal expertise has become much more important lately, as organizations have become less modular and more networked, and as lifelong employment has given way to frequent shifts in employers and careers (Zuboff & Maxmin 2003). Unfortunately, horizontal expertise—and boundary crossing in general—tends to be far less supported, both formally and informally.
Graphic design is a particularly interesting case in these terms. Graphic designers are knowledge workers: they create, develop, and use information in conjunction with others across organizational and disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, they often work in networked projects, projects that involve temporarily assembling a network of workers to accomplish a particular goal before dispersing. In the service of this work, graphic designers have to continually engage in horizontal learning so that they can represent a particular client, speak to a particular audience, and interact competently with subcontractors and vendors (such as printers, web designers, photographers, and graphic artists).
In this exploratory qualitative study, we seek insight into how working graphic designers perform knowledge work: how they communicate within their temporary networks, how they manage and coordinate their time and projects, how they engage in horizontal learning to understand the others in these networks, how they establish and maintain stable relationships with others in the network, how they establish and pursue long-term strategy in their practices, and how they receive training relative to knowledge work.
Data collection involves three methods for exploring consultants’ training and practices:
Researchers will analyze the observational, interview, and artifact data using visual representations (activity system diagrams, genre ecology models, communicative event models, sociotechnical graphs, operations tables, and contradiction-discoordination-breakdown tables)
A. Sources of Potential Participants. The second researcher will recruit up to 20 participants through ACC's graphic design program. Participants will be Austin-area graphic designers. Involvement should span June 1-August 1, 2007.
NOTE: For your study, involvement will span the semester.
B. Procedures for the recruitment of the participants. The second researcher will contact participants through her institutional and personal connections with local area graphic designers.
C. Procedure for obtaining informed consent. Participants will be presented with consent forms (attached).
NOTE: Below, make these match your own research methods (above).
D. Research Protocol. Researchers will observe participants in their work settings approximately 1-2 times; observations will be for approximately one hour. Researchers will conduct 30-minute interviews immediately after each observation. Total involvement time will be 1.5-3 hours per participant. During interviews and observations, researchers will identify artifacts of interest; participants will redact these artifacts and present them to the researchers. (See Section V above).
E. Privacy and confidentiality of participants. Participants can choose to discontinue participation at any time; if they choose to do so, their data will be destroyed. Participants can determine acceptable times for interviews and observations. The participant’s identity will not be disclosed in reports. Researchers will refer to participant with a pseudonym and redact any identifying characteristics in reports. Data will be kept confidential and secure (see F below).
NOTE: Below, change these to reflect where you'll safeguard data and from where you'll get research equipment.
F. Confidentiality of the research data. Research data will be kept in a locked cabinet at researchers’ offices and on a secure server to which only the researchers have access. For interviews, (a) the interviews will be audio or videotaped; (b) the digital files will be coded so that no personally identifying information is visible on them; (c) they will be digitally secured with a password; (d) they will be heard or viewed only for research purposes by researchers; and (e) after they are transcribed or coded, they will be destroyed.
G. Research resources, including videocameras, digital voice recorders, and server space, will be provided by the Computer Writing and Research Lab.
VII. Potential risks. The research may uncover weaknesses as well as strengths in the participants’ work. Reports will remind readers that this should happen and that the role of this research is to better understand the knowledge work components of graphic design as a whole, not to evaluate individual work styles. In addition, the participants’ identities will be kept secret. Participants will be assigned pseudonyms in any publications resulting from this research.
VIII. Potential benefits. This study will help to improve the graphic design program at ACC, and will also have implications for understanding knowledge work and collaboration in technology studies. In addition, the project should serve as a way for participants to articulate, reflect upon, and justify or improve their work practices respective to knowledge work.
IX. Sites or agencies involved in the research project. Research will be conducted at the designers' workplaces.