Before you build anything else, you need to own a specific moment. Not a domain. A moment.
What This Is
This is not a reflection and not a plan. It is a design claim — a statement of the specific human moment you are solving for in the Bhutan MDRO context.
Four things it must contain:
Your user — not a job title. A specific person in a specific role, at a specific moment in their workday.
The moment — what are they trying to do, what constraint makes it hard right now, and why the written guideline doesn't help them in that moment.
The pain point — what you think goes wrong for this person right now. What's the cost of the current situation — delayed decisions, workarounds, errors, wasted time? This is your hypothesis, not a proven fact.
Your territory — one sentence that stakes your claim, clear enough that another student reading it would immediately know if their problem overlaps with yours. Then one sentence describing something you learned about the domain (from the class session, the guideline, or your own research) that made you not pursue your first instinct. If your first instinct survived, explain what confirmed it.
The Differentiation Rule
No two students may work on problems that are more than 50% similar. Your stake goes into a shared doc during Week 9 class. If there's a collision, both students have 48 hours to differentiate. First to stake a clear, specific claim owns the territory.
Vague claims don't count — "improving communication" is not a stake.
What good looks like vs. what doesn't count
What a real stake looks like vs. what doesn't count
Strong example:
User: A ward nurse at a district hospital in Thimphu who has just received a patient transferred from isolation. She has 4 minutes between patient handoffs.
Moment: She needs to know whether the isolation protocol for this specific organism requires continued contact precautions or can be de-escalated — right now, not after she reads 28 pages.
Pain point: I think she defaults to maintaining full contact precautions even when de-escalation is appropriate, because looking it up takes longer than she has. That means extra PPE use, slower patient flow, and isolation beds occupied longer than necessary.
Territory: Decision-support for de-escalation decisions in active patient handoff, specifically for nurses in district hospital settings. I originally assumed isolation decisions were about knowing the protocol. After the class session, I learned that ward nurses in district hospitals often manage isolation with shared equipment across patients — the real constraint isn't knowledge, it's logistics.
Weak example (and why it fails):
User: Clinical staff in Bhutan. Moment: They need to understand the MDRO guidelines better. Pain point: The guidelines are hard to use. Territory: Making the MDRO guideline more accessible.
This fails because "clinical staff" is not a user, "better" is not a moment, "hard to use" is not a pain point (hard how? for whom? with what consequence?), and "accessible" is not a territory. Nothing in this stake would change if you swapped Bhutan for any other country.
What to Submit
Written text in the Canvas submission box. 300 words max.
The limit is not arbitrary — if you need more than 300 words to stake your claim, the claim isn't specific enough yet.
Format: Written text in Canvas submission box, 300 words max Due: Points: 10