Thesis Possibility: Truly Integrated Development Environments
A possible thesis topic that explores closer integration of various parts of programming: writing, running, reading, and debugging code. How can principles of programming environments for beginners (e.g. hands-on exploration, visualization of program execution) be applied to professional programmers? How can we play with existing code to figure out what it does? How can we take advantage of tools that understand the structure and function of code?
One inspiration is Subtext, another is Jared Schiffman's thesis on the aesthetics of computation, a third is the Omniscient Debugger.
A possible difficulty is that although I consider this to a legitimate topic in interaction design, it may be outside the specific expertise of the IDII faculty.