Theme 5: Design research

Fernaeus, Y. & Jacobsson, M. (2009). Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction. New York: ACM. 

Personalizing things that you own is very common. For example almost everybody with a MacBook has their favorite case to carry this in. Every smartphone user has their own background picture that makes the phone theirs. You can put patches on your backpack to make it your own, if you like manga you will put manga characters on it. 
In the paper they talk about something called "actDresses" and this is just that: a way to make something (technological) more personalized. They put a collar and a blanket on a pet robot-dinosaur and it also responds to this, and it makes it more "dog" like. They put patches of comics on a vacuum-cleaner to make it more personalized. This way of doing a study, that they test how it looks and feels for you, they create the scenario, I think is great to evaluate the responses in this case. I think that it was interesting and the topic was fun to read about.

Question: Design research is not something you read about everyday. When especially is this useful and/or should be done?



Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008). Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 10(6), 1022-1033.

How can media technologies be evaluated?
When I read the course "evaluation methods" we wanted to test how fast people types SMS on diffrent kind of mobiles. Mobiles with touchscreens, a physical keyboard and old phones using T-9. We did this buy using user testing and also asking questions like how much they use SMS in their everyday life. This is one way of evaluate media technologies, and I believe user testing is the most comon and effective on, because most of media technologies are something people will use and we need to test how it works, how people use it and why they would use it and in what way. The method used during the user test will of course variate depending on what kind of media technologies we are talking about.

What role will prototypes play in research?
Well prototypes has and always will be a great way of testing your product, so they will continue to be used. This is because the prototype is made in the early stages of the project and this will give you a great understanding, even tough it is just a prototype and will not of course be as great as the finalized one, of what needs to be done, or if it is a failure right there and then.

3. Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?
I figure that this depends of what kind of prototype we are talking about. If it's something high-tech and you don't know if the technologies will work/have to prove that it works, or if it's something that you think people will use = buy, but you don't know for sure, then a proof that the market want's this would be a good idea. So depending on what perspective we look at this can differ want kind of proof of concept prototype needs to be made.