Theme 5: Design research - reflection

This week’s theme was about research design and in order to prepare for that I read, just as everyone else, Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration by Li et al and Comics, Robotics, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses by Fernaeus and Jacobsson. I thought both papers were very interesting and made use of intriguing design concepts. Before this week I was unsure of what design research meant even though I had a hunch. When I have read the other blog posts this week I feel that I have learned more about the characteristics of design research as well as confirming the hunches that I had. Many blog posts have reflected a lot on prototypes and their characteristics and limitations. It feels like many of the students have good knowledge about this subject and I believe that it is because we are familiar with using prototypes. Media technology and especially human-computer interaction have a large focus on designing for the users and thus make use of prototypes in evaluating a design concept. So I believe design is a type of research that has a strong connection to media technology.

Unfortunately I did not have the possibility to attend Ylva Fernaeus lecture but I did go on the lecture by Haibo Li. It was an interesting one about the process of design research. The process includes several steps like idea generation, idea filtration, validation, evaluation and communication. An interesting thing that Li talked about was the time spent on defining your problem versus solving it. His theory was that if you want to be famous, you should spend 90 % of your time on solving the problem and 10 % on defining it. If you want to be great though, you should revert those numbers, spending 90 % on defining and 10 on solving. A lot of time for this week’s theme has been spent reflecting on prototypes and how they are relevant in design research. Li thought that it was very important to develop a proof of concept and then later on a prototype, in order to validate and evaluate your idea. This is not something that is new for me since it is important in human-computer interaction, which I have studied before, but it is good to get it confirmed that prototypes are important. One question on the assignment for the prior blog post for this week’s theme was about how design research can be communicated or presented. I did not reflect on this question but what I have learned from reading other students blog posts is that it can be done through showing prototypes or visualizations. Haibo suggested the approach of using an elevator pitch, which is a short summary that gives others a clear picture of your idea and research. Further on Haibo showed various examples of interesting design research.