Theme 5 - Reflection

First off, I would like to begin this reflection by saying how much I missed the seminar discussion this week, which was replaced by another lecture. I know that these last themes might not be as philosophical and discussable as the previous ones, but they have still been awesome in terms of learning and hearing about other people’s perceptions.

Anyways, let’s move on to the lectures of this week. The first one was with our own Haibo Li, who talked about design and problem solving, which was demonstrated by a short clip from the movie Johnny English. Here the main character, played by Rowan Atkinson, follows the bad guy across the roof. The bad guy parkours his way forward, while Johnny English takes an alternative, easier route past the hurdles (such as going through doors and using ladders). The morale of this story is that there are several ways to solve a problem, some may be a little easier than others, but they can all lead to a solution. The trick is to observe and to deconstruct the problem into smaller parts. Sometimes, the problem might even be something different than you think, such as with the example with the teacher, student and the hungry bear. The problem isn’t to outrun the bear, but to outrun the slowest companion.

So the point with design research is to basically design problem solving. The solutions are based upon observations, where the design prototype is used as a medium. It’s a good way to understand how other people or objects other than oneself react to certain things. Don Norman, who’s a cognitive psychologist and author of The Design of Everyday Things, explains this as follows: “We tend to project our own rationalisations and beliefs onto the actions and beliefs of others”. Thus it’s not always good to assume things a priori, as discussed during previous themes. We simply have to acknowledge that others don’t think as us, and also that our own minds don’t work as objectively as we would like. The opposite to this, which we learned during the Human-Computer-Interaction course, would be ‘Genius Design’. Here the designer takes it upon themselves to design something without the input of other potential users, which some say is possible if the designer is very skilled at what he/she does. However, after having taken this course, I wouldn’t be so sure about that.

The other lecture was with Anders Lundström, and I have to admit that I had problems following the content, since it was a bit unstructured. What I did catch was that prototyping is supposed to “provoke to gain knowledge” and doesn’t have to really solve anything. As in Anders paper, the one about charge displays in electric cars which we read before this theme, it wasn’t a proof of concept. The aim was therefore not to prove anything, but rather to see how the design itself would work. In other words, knowledge was gained, but there was never a final design for the display. This was an excellent example of prototyping not only being used in the development of new products, but also for the research itself.

Sources

http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/complete-beginners-guide-to-design-research/

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-myth-of-the-genius-designer/