Terry Love, Design Research Thinker has listed a simple and clear variation of George Polya’s method of thinking about problems – pitched more as life coaching:

What you know (e.g. day to day reality)
What you don’t know (e.g. knowledge held by others)
What you know you know (e.g. Science, good information, reflection)
What you don’t know you know (e.g. intuition, tacit knowledge)
What you know you don’t know (e.g. emerging issues, scenarios, knowledge from asking questions)
What you don’t know you don’t know (outside your paradigms and ways of thinking)

Check out Polya’s original How to Solve Problems here:

http://www.math.wichita.edu/history/men/polya.html

Not to be outdone, Donald Rumsfeld also had a go at something like this in his (in)famous known, known speech

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

When Rumsfeld came out with this (about Iraq) it sounded so funny in a 1984 sort of way but actually, its word perfect and makes total sense. Try using it when thinking about Final Year Major Projects.