The theme of this week is design research, which I found extra interesting because unlike the other weeks, I didn’t really understand what that meant before reading the papers.
This week I begun by reading the paper Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration by Réhman et al (2008).
In the paper the researchers constructs a prototype and evaluates it by observing test subjects while they use the prototype. At first, what I found the most interesting was the researchers obsession with mobile battery time. After about half the paper, I remembered to go back and check the publication date and suddenly everything started making much more sense. I find it a good reminder of how fast things can change in the field of media technology.
So, as far as I can tell, design research usually involves creating a prototype, and then using the prototype for testing. It allows researchers to try their idéas in a relatively cheap and fast way and get an idea of what is achievable and identify where problems may lie. If we wouldn’t do prototypes, and developed complete products and systems straight away, we would waste a lot of time and money and still risk that the system is too complex to draw any strong conclusions from testing.
I believe this is a very good way to do a lot of research in media technology. In my own experience, media technology can be very much about things. Things and systems. I think a lot of research in this field would be very hypothetical and abstract if we didn’t do prototypes and design research.
The paper Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses by Fernaeus and Jacobsson, (2009), continues on the theme of design research. The paper describes some prototypes that was created, but unlike Turn your mobile into the ball this paper doesn’t give much detail on how the prototypes were developed or evaluated.
I would like to ask Ylva Fernaeus about the relationship between creating prototypes and making research generalisable. My assumption is that the more specific and developed a prototype is, the harder it would be to draw broad conclusions, but it would be interesting to hear her perspective on this.
I agree with you that a prototype is of high necessity during a research when it comes to the realization of a concept. I somewhat came to the same conclusion on my blog post, stating that the whole concept may fall short of a prototype that doesn't grasp the main ideas covered by the concept. It's very important in my opinion.
SvaraRaderaI also agree with you when you say that it's a shock how fast technological developments occur, and what is now "up to date" could possibly be obsolete within 3-4 years! I wonder how many projects had prototypes that couldn't work years ago due to the technology that is available, but may be worth relooking into now?
SvaraRadera