- Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008). Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 10(6), 1022-1033
- Fernaeus & Tholander Finding design qualities in a tangible programming space
- Lundström Differentiated Driving Range
Lecture 1 - Haibo Lee
The main topic of Haibo Lee’s lecture was design research in Media Technology. His main points where the following:
- How to come up with an problem
- How to filter the idea
- How to validate the idea
- How to evaluate the idea
- How to communicate the idea
He talked a lot about how crucial it is to define a problem properly before attempting to solve it. He even stated that the distribution between them is 90% defining the problem and 10% solving it. I do not know where he got these numbers from, but that’s not what’s important here. The important thing is that defining the problem is much more important and what you should divide more time to. He’s way of convincing us was by telling us about a problem in the field of face recognition. Webcameras that were mounted on top of computer screen had difficulties recognising faces and while some tried to solve this without questioning the position of the camera, Haibo’s solution was to mount the camera on the person instead.
He continued to talk about proof-of-concept, which I have prior to this lecture regarded as a way to show that an idea/project is realistic. Haibo said that a proof-of-concept is important to validate your idea, but how you present it is very important, you must know your audience. I found this very interesting. If you present it with too much technical details or with too much focus on revenue and prestige then it might backfire and appear like you do not know what you are presenting. Therefore to communicate your idea with a entrepreneur pitch is the best way, it’s like a middle ground between the two extremes.
Lecture 2 - Anders Lundström
The lecture by Anders Lundström was very improvised since he filled in for Ylva Fernaeus at the last second, resulting in a lecture that was quite hard to follow.
A big part of the lecture was about prototypes; what they are, their purpose, how one goes about designing one. I had some sort of understanding of this before this lecture but Anders clear some things up. According to Anders the main reason of making a prototype is to gain knowledge. The knowledge you (hopefully) gain depends on how you designed your prototype. According to Anders we can create a design for a prototype to get the answers to the research problem. This lead to the next topic: design method, which I must admit I did not fully understand. To gain knowledge and conduct research on a prototype one needs empirical data. According to Anders the empirical data is artificial since the empirical data is created by the researcher and not, for example, observed.
He continued to talk about proof-of-concept, which I have prior to this lecture regarded as a way to show that an idea/project is realistic. Haibo said that a proof-of-concept is important to validate your idea, but how you present it is very important, you must know your audience. I found this very interesting. If you present it with too much technical details or with too much focus on revenue and prestige then it might backfire and appear like you do not know what you are presenting. Therefore to communicate your idea with a entrepreneur pitch is the best way, it’s like a middle ground between the two extremes.
Lecture 2 - Anders Lundström
The lecture by Anders Lundström was very improvised since he filled in for Ylva Fernaeus at the last second, resulting in a lecture that was quite hard to follow.
A big part of the lecture was about prototypes; what they are, their purpose, how one goes about designing one. I had some sort of understanding of this before this lecture but Anders clear some things up. According to Anders the main reason of making a prototype is to gain knowledge. The knowledge you (hopefully) gain depends on how you designed your prototype. According to Anders we can create a design for a prototype to get the answers to the research problem. This lead to the next topic: design method, which I must admit I did not fully understand. To gain knowledge and conduct research on a prototype one needs empirical data. According to Anders the empirical data is artificial since the empirical data is created by the researcher and not, for example, observed.
Hi,
SvaraRaderaI think that you have a great summary on what has been said during the lectures of this theme. To add to your discussion on the second lecture. I also found it interesting that Anders also explained that the difference between design in research and design in general was that design in general aims more to seem appealing, to for example a customer, rather than to gain knowledge.
Great reflection and great summary with clear examples from what was said during the lectures!
Hej,
SvaraRaderaIt's good that you already write in your pre-blog that research can never really be replicable - I only understood that during the lecture last week. You however seem to have understood proof of concept in another way after the first lecture. It really is very important to keep your audience in mind! I would even go further and highlight how important the audience is in the entire research communication.
hi,
SvaraRaderai have to agree with you that presenting idea from the design research probably challenging especially for engineer who use technical terms all the time. and audience usually be those from business area. all the good work would not be fully appreciate if the pitch isn't adjusting to the audience.
as for the second lecture, from what i understood from the class. researcher method is designing ways to look what's under empirical data by the help of prototype searing for answers or new findings. i wasn't sure either because the second lecture is alil hard to grap.
nice work though :)
Hello Alexis!
SvaraRaderaI like how you contrast the both lectures we had for this seminar. I agree with you that Haibo's was more practical (a little to practical for me) and that the other more theoretical was more difficult to understand. It felt very unfortunate that the second lecture had to be improvised (although I feel that the pseudo-seminar approach was the right way to go) since I really missed the theory of design research in Haibo's lecture.
Yeah,Haibo's lecture is vivid and practical while the Anders' lecture contains more information and it is hard to understand. I would like to say I did not understand most of the content in lecture 2.What I know is a bout the use and aim of prototype.While as for the emperical data,I knew less about it.From your perspective, the empirical knowledge is artificial and produced by researcher.
SvaraRaderaThanks for your reflection.
You did a good job on preparing and understanding theme 5. I guess you are correct in saying that it is not the most important point to find out where Haibo got the numbers from which he used to illustrate the importance of finding a good definition for your problem. For me it seemed like he estimated them from his experience. Nevertheless, I think that he could have emphasized the importance of this problem definition-problem solution balance without made up numbers. I would have preferred it that way. Moreover, you mention the prototype in research. I agree with you that in this field a prototype has the purpose to gain knowledge. But I would like to add that you could put that into contrast to a business prototype which already acts as a possible solution.
SvaraRaderaHi Alexis,
SvaraRaderaI must say you did a very well organized summary of theme five. Especially the first lecture of Haibo Lee is very well reproduced and I liked that you put a special focus on the importance of defining a problem. Furthermore, I like your example as it shows the out-of-the-box thinking, which is needed to solve problems in the right way. I also agree to the statement in your post prior to the lecture that research never can be replicable.
Hi Alexis!
SvaraRaderaThanks for your thoughts on this week's theme. I think you structured it well and it was easy to follow. I like your summary of Haibo's lecture and found it extra interesting since I wasn't able to participate in it. It seemed interesting since it had a different approach, more entrepreneurship than research.
I agree that the second one was harder to follow since it was quite improvised. Is it really artificial data when conducting studies on prototypes though, shouldn't qualitative data in that case be called artificial as well in that case? Or do you mean that there is different background research which is necessary to do research with prototypes?
Hi!
SvaraRaderaYou make a good and interesting blog post of theme 5. Your disposition and explanations of the two different lectures are well conducted and you mention some of the most important concepts. I think you have extracted the most important concept form the lecture, where you from lecture 1 discuss how to define a problem and from lecture 2, highlights the importance of the prototype. Well done!
/Paul