Theme 5: Design research (pre seminar)

Theme 5: Design research

Reflection part 1

When designing media technologies, especially previously unexplored technologies such as the hapics used in the paper “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” by Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008) I believe several steps are necessary in order to come up with a good concept of the product or program. As a first step you obviously need some product idea with theoretical support of why this product might be a good idea to invest into. In the case of this paper the idea was quite wild but backed up with the theoretic explaining that the vibrotactile sense could harvest a lot of information.

A later step is to evaluate whether this product actually is useful or not. In the case of the paper I believe it is useful to design a prototype to test the basic mechanics of the product, in this case if the vibrotactile sense could be used to follow the football game or if it was too complicated, distracting etc. If the technology is quite unexplored I feel like a designing a prototype followed up by user tests and evaluations might be a good idea. If the potential of the technology already is explored this might be an unnecessary cost, for example if one were to develop a faster computer or a screen with more colors.

The potentials with designing a prototype are that you can test you hypothesis in a non-theoretical environment. You can use user evaluations to gain knowledge about the topic and to prove theoretical concepts. A prototype can be demonstrated to the public in order to gain attention and trust towards your product.. There are different kinds of prototypes high and low fidelity prototypes. A low fidelity prototype might be used to illustrate a concept, while to evaluate something more carefully a high fidelity prototype might be more useful. The downsides of developing a prototype are obviously that it is costly and time consuming, and if the prototype turned out to be a failure, or if dramatic changes had to be done to it the investment might have been for nothing. If you use a low fidelity prototype the costs might decrease dramatically and it might be worth making a prototype for the case of illustration. You can gain knowledge about what works and what does not by developing a prototype, but it might be big investment.

Reflection part 2

How does a collaborative setting differ from a single user setting as regards methodology used and the results obtained?

During a collaborative setting users can communicate with each other. A problem with collaborative studies could be that users interfere and affect each other, that could both be problematic ( if some thought get held back or affected by for example group pressure) and positive (participants might stimulate each other to get more well thought off answers. We can example of a collaborative study in Sallnäs text  "A haptic tool for group work about geometrical concepts engaging blind and sighted pupils" we see example of a collaborative study where visually impaired and blindfolded people work together with sighted people to perform tasks. The result might be harder to analyze in collaborative environments as more variables have to be taken into account for.

How can qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study complement each other?

One thing I learned in the seminar last week was that qualitative studies can be used to gain further insight on a previously (relatively) unexplored topic. The qualitative study can be used to formulate hypothesis and the hypothesis can be used to formulate good questions that might be suitable in a quantitative study. The quantitative study is then used to confirm and prove the hypothesis in order to form a complete study.

How can using both subjective and objective methods give a better understanding of a phenomenon?

I believe that subjective and objective methods can give different perspectives on a topic as well as complement each other. Feelings, for example, is a subjective measure. To investigate how people feels after being treated by something one might use both subjective and objective methods to analyze. You cannot definitely say that “to fix a tooth hurts” as the result of someone saying that is subjective, and not objective. Nevertheless objective methods can be used to compile data gathered by subjective methods. If a large enough percentage says that to fix a tooth hurts a lot one might consider usage of narcotics to lessen the pain as a standard procedure.