Theme 2: Reflections

To start with, when I together with my teammate wrote our bachelor thesis I thought it was rather hard to relate our practical human-computer interaction project to different theories which were especially appropriate to our study. We used only some generally suitable theories within the human-computer interaction at the beginning, apparently because we needed to have something to establish our study on. In the end we found some more specific theories which we used but, anyway I believe that this particular example show us how hard it could be to choose the most suitable theory for a specific case, especially when we are not familiar with so many.

Recently, after the seminar and previous readings about theories, I find it easier to describe a theory, by putting it in a specific group or context regarding if the theory is about analysis, explanation, prediction, explanation and prediction or finally design and action. The paper I chose used in my opinion primary the latter one, which means that the theory applied a lot of different pictures, diagrams and so on to emphasize the main purpose of the design and action, by showing how to do something. I was pretty sure at this point, that the theory belonged to design and action.

Suddenly the authors started to explain several other theories which I wasn´t acquainted with at all. Spontaneously, I thought these theories were like I wrote in the previous contribution to the blog, used to strengthen the main purpose of the game, but somehow I managed to not reflect on by any means that these other theories in turn, apparently belong to another theory type group and not design and action. I became aware of this right after the seminar. 

Obviously there are a lot of theories which are especially appropriate for design and action but at the same time, I believe that any theory type could be useful within the design and action context. Social Cognitive theory for instance is an EP-theory but in my case was it put in a context about design and action by showing the meaning and different achievements of the game. If this theory had a greater impact on the study would it obviously be harder to identify the main theory type. This tell us how broad and complicated a theory about design and action could be, although it´s supposed to give us a more concrete point of view of what the study is all about.