Theme 5: Design research

Part 1

 

This week we are looking into design research, something that I think was demonstrated quite well in the article “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” by Shafiq ur Réhman, Jiong Sun, Li Liu, and Haibo Li. Here the authors aim to create an alternative way of watching football/soccer on a mobile phone, where the phone’s vibrations are used to make the game feel more vivid and exciting. In order to create such a game, the authors decided to conduct a quantitative research and make a prototype which would be tested by students and teachers at Umeå University.

There are many benefits in using a prototype in the researching process. If the goal is to create a product or application of some sort, it makes it cheaper if a simpler version is thoroughly tested before releasing the actual product to the public, which without the first step could be both faulty and expensive. Nowadays, many products are really user-oriented, and with social media all users become potential and powerful critics. If a new operating system or game is full of bugs when released, everybody will know about it very soon. Thus, testing using the actual consumers before hand is almost necessary in some cases, I would say. Furthermore, there are many aspects within technology that needs to feel right. As for this research, it was a question about how strong the vibrations should be, how to behave and when to be triggered. Things that are difficult to know beforehand. Another role of prototypes could be that it’s a good way to learn how the test subjects behave in general, which could be used in other research fields.

The fact that the prototypes are often simpler and cheaper could also act as a limitation, as they don’t work exactly as the end product. In the article, the product would use automatic video analysis to trigger the vibrations, and react to cues like which team has the ball, when it’s kicked and when someone shoots for goal. Some really complex coding had to be done here, but to solve it in a simpler and faster way, the researchers used manually controlled vibrations instead.

Part 2

 

In the paper “Finding Design Qualities in a Tangible Programming Space” by Ylva Fernaeus & Jakob Tholander, it is investigated on how to combine digital and physical interaction. Here, the empirical data was the testing through experience, where children got to try out the system and interact with physical objects and see how they corresponded to the things on screen.

The second article, “Differentiated Driving Range: Exploring a Solution to the Problems with the “Guess-O-Meter” in Electric Cars” by Anders Lundström, doesn’t focus as much on prototyping and testing, but is a doing research based on design nevertheless. Here the author writes about the energy display in electric cars, and how it isn’t perfect in telling how far the car can get with the remaining electrical charge. In order to design a better display, Lundström not only interviews drivers of electrical cars, but also test drives a number of different models himself, which would be the empirical data in this case.

Whether practical design work can be considered a 'knowledge contribution’, I’d say that it certainly can. It would probably fall under the a posteriori knowledge category, as it’s about gaining knowledge through experience which Lundströms research is a perfect example of. Many people learn by doing, and in some research it’s even necessary to be practical and not only theoretical, as in the Tangible Programming article where the results would be far more inconclusive if just analysing how the computer system works.

About the differences between research oriented design and other types of design works, I'd say that the first one is designed to aid the research and prove theories, while the other is often created to accomplish things by itself. For example, the Tangible Programming system was created to research how the children behaved when experiencing multi-media interaction, but a real programming platform is used as it is and not necessarily to study the users.

When it comes to differences with design driven research compared to other research practices, let’s say the quantitative research methods we were discussing in the previous theme, the main difference would probably be that the sooner is more user-oriented and practical. That is, that the research is done in a posteriori, to actively participate with the ambition to create something new. The latter is done by analyzing data in order to gain knowledge about something that already is.