In this course, I find this reflecting posts quite interesting. Some weeks I feel like I have a lot of things I want to say, other weeks I don’t feel I have anything to say that has not already been mentioned in a lecture. This week is a first however, as I feel more confused about the theme now than before studying it. This probably has to do, at least in part, with the fact that I have been focusing a lot of my attention to the other course I’m taking, Future of Media, as we have our final presentation today, (thursday).
One thing I hadn’t really considered while preparing for this week, was that the act of designing can be research in itself, which was the case with actDresses. I believe that realization was quite important for me as I notice thinking about research as only evaluation can be a bit limiting. I notice however that research through design poses its own set of challenges. I am not sure if it’s due to the nature of the research or my own inexperience with reading design research, but when reading the paper on actDresses I remember I had trouble finding any definite conclusions or a clear message to take away.
One other very interesting and thought provoking thing I learnt, (or re-learnt), this week was the importance of knowing and keeping statistical methods fresh in your memory. Haibo Li dedicated a segment of his lecture on the useage of ANOVA, analysis of variance, as a tool for researchers to prove that a study has shown some significant results. I have studied probability theory and statistics, but that was a few years ago and it was a bit frightening to realize how much I had forgotten. From his lecture, I learnt that understanding statistics, and knowing how statistical measurements work is very important for me, not only as I will soon write my masters thesis, but also just to be able to correctly understand and evaluate many scientific papers.
I had the same feeling of hitch in grasping in which terms design could be defined research.
SvaraRaderaI think the main difficulty in this concept is that we tend to confuse the word "design" with the meaning we mean today, as a branch of art, but the primitive meaning is to define features of an object satisfying particular requirements, meant to accomplish a task.
Moreover the practical nature of this research field un-focuses our judgement on what the term "theory" strictly means.
Hi Jakob! I also have the same question - can we consider the act of designing as the research in itself. I think no, because as I understood design research has the aim to create product or service to satisfy human needs and it should answer three questions - how the design process will proceed, what needs the design will address and what form the resulting design will take. So the desing process is only a part of design research.
SvaraRadera