These are organized around the major parts of the course. You dont have to stick so closely to the syllabus, but your project should tie in in a substantial way.
Contrast the models of knowledge acquisition and learning implied in Normans articles and the Piaget and Papert articles. Give a concrete example by analyzing some knowledge or skill you have acquired.
Propose a scheme for analyzing the personality and emotional content for a web site. Relevant factors are language, use of color, image vs. text content and other aspects of design. Can you extract such information by hand from aggressive commercial sites (sites that try hard to promote something)? Alternatively, write a program to do this.
Do the same thing for an interactive agent such as one of the Extempo Characters (several can be downloaded and run on your machine). Do you notice emotional shifts during dialogue with these characters?
Perform a GOMS analysis of a user interface. Try to stretch the model in an interesting way: e.g. work at a higher level of abstraction that keystrokes and mouse input, or pick a synchronous collaborative task.
Papert's microworlds were mostly math/science domains, and from the concrete (geometry, physics) parts of those domains. Can you come up with microworld examples from other domains, especially more abstract ones? And/or propose another programming language that would be appropriate for those domains?
Do a speech-act analysis of an office task, like making a travel booking or requesting computer support. Try to anticipate the possible discourses. Include low-level recovery acts for common misunderstandings. It will probably help to have real dialogues with others to work from.
Apply the ideas from the media richness paper to a non-office domain, e.g. to a collaborative design task. Suggest a variety of digital media that could be built into a computer-aided design tool and how "best practices" of use could be encouraged.
Fundamental attribution errors complicate the design of emotionally perceptive and expressive computers. Suggest some design changes that would improve perception or expression for affective systems.
Classify the persuasive strategies employed in say: (i) Microsoft Powerpoint Templates, (ii) Several commercial websites. Pay special attention to strategies where the persuasion (and strategy) are not obvious but subliminal.
Program an avatar or physical character (we have one 18 degree-of-freedom SONY dog available for this) for a variety of affective displays. Write a program for sensible transitions between those displays, ideally in response to stimuli from a human interlocutor.
Critique one or more teleconferencing systems (Netmeeting and Mbone tools are freely available) from the point of view of non-verbal communication. How could you improve the breadth and quality of cues sent and received?