Theme 5: Design Research

Reflections on "Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration"

When doing any kind of research or design research the most importan step is to consider "who is the target" and  "who am I designing it for"? This goes hand in hand with realizing the limitations and possibilites of the human body. In this paper, for example, when designing how the vibration system shall work we have to consider the dynamics of the human touch sense (it can not be too detailed, but it can not be too many vibrations either, since it will be annoying or painful for the user.) 

Further, to evaluate the system, using a set standard can be useful to both evaluate and compare it to other systems. For example in this study, using defined terms such as Effectiveness, Efficiency and Satisfaction. Using a well defines systems for evaluation makes it possible to asign numbers and calculate/measure how good the idea is.

The prototype of course plays a very important part in the research. If the resarch is built around a prototype then in one way it becomes the whole resarch. For example, if the prototype is built in a bad way, the research can become useless (at least for the specific questions you are trying to answer). 

Reflections on Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander's papers

A collaborative setting and a single user setting differs in a lot of aspects and provides their own difficulties and opportunities. In a collaborative setting more social aspects has to be considered, for example, how do the users react in this social setting, how do thery react to each other and how does it affect the research. People behave differently when alone or in a group, and that factor has to be considered when doing and designing the resarch (and that's not an easy task of course!).

Interestingly both quantitative and qualitative methods can be derived from one another, depending on how the resarch is conducted. If doing interviews (a qualitative method) the transcripts from the interviews can later be analyzed in  a quantitative way, for example by counting how many times a certain word was used.