1. http://u1vfukfo.blogspot.se/2015/10/theme-5-post-posting-design-research.html?showComment=1445113808224#c6110466909969830263
2. http://ixxzw.blogspot.se/2015/10/theme-5-after.html?showComment=1445116719557#c1295952177936815110
3. http://mediatechnologybycorinna.blogspot.se/2015/10/theme-5-design-research-reflection.html?showComment=1445118490864#c8801631828563817467
4. http://dm2572byen.blogspot.se/2015/10/theme-5-design-research_10.html?showComment=1445277321530
5. http://ninopmedia.blogspot.se/2015/10/theme-5-reflections-0-false-18-pt-18-pt.html?showComment=1445278809570
Showing posts with label Theme 5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theme 5. Show all posts
Monday, October 19, 2015
Sunday, October 11, 2015
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.
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
Thursday, October 1, 2015
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.
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