Theme 5: post seminar

Haibo li
Haibo talked about what he thought was important when making a design research. He divided the research in to five different questions or problems to solve in order to write a good paper. First you have to come up with an idea. It is really important to during the first stages of your research that you define the problem very carefully. It is easy to complicate a task that in fact could be really simple. Therefore it is important to really think about all the aspects of the task in hand to be sure that you simplify the problem as much as possible. Think more about the problem than the solution since the solution could make you blind, and not let you think about other solutions that could be simpler. He illustrated this by showing us how they came up with the idea to track head-movement by placing the web camera on the head instead of on the screen in front of you. I think that was a clear example of how they thought more about what was the actual problem and how could we fix it in the simplest possible way. The more we define and think through our ideas, the less time we have to devote to solving the problem.
After you have come up with the ideas you should filter trough them. There should be a technical evaluation on what will work good and what will not work and so on. According to Haibo we should look for a “breakthrough technique” and have a business mind when doing this. A great idea is worth billions of dollar. Personally I do not think it is that simple since a very bad idea in some ares, for example the environment, could still be worth a lot of money. So I do not really know what he meant with this, it can not be that simple.
Then you should validate your idea and build some kind of proof of concept. It could be something really simple just to test that your idea will work at all. When you have built and tested the proof of concept it is a good time to build a prototype and evaluate your idea and later on communicate it to the rest of the world.

Haibo’s lecture give me some new thoughts to think about when making research. Even though I already knew that it is important to really define your problem before starting to solve it, it was nice to see clear examples of when it really paid of and ended in a better solution.

Anders Lundström
This lecture was harder to follow and understand since I did not feel that there was a clear path and goal of it. I understand that Anders did not have time to prepare a lecture since he did not know about it in time, but still, that is how it is. Instead we had a discussion about what Anders thought was the point of a design research.

Through design, we shape a prototype that answers a particular question. In other words, the whole point of design research is to come up with a way that will give you new knowledge. The empirical data that comes from design research is artificial since it does no exist in the “real” world. This data is useless on its own. Therefore it is really important to analyse it thoroughly, since only then it becomes research and we can gain new knowledge. Anders defined new knowledge as the attention to something that has not been thought about before.

Even though I thought this last lecture did not have any structure, I feel like I understood the point of design research. It was maybe a bit more abstract than it had to be. But like Anders said, design research is a relatively new method in science and it could be hard to exactly define what it is.