Theme 5: Reflections

This week has been about design research but most of the theme so far has been spent on looking for relevant research papers to involve and write about within the group project and further make the study coherent with different writings and opinions. 

I have to say that neither the lecture nor the seminar turned out to be as I expected regarding what we discussed during these events. I thought that this theme would have much more focus on the physical structure of the design so to speak, how different designs actually were created in order to for instance match the participants’ opinions as good as possible from the evaluation. Instead both these events felt more like a summary of the whole course which gave me an interesting point of view of important aspects that I didn´t think about during previous themes. 

One particular example was the process of iteration which makes it hard to predict the upcoming economical and time-consuming efforts that are required for a study. Recently I read a paper for the group work which basically was about the benefits of feedback loops, which means a repetitive cycle of the method phase often useful in order the get more in depth information. I wonder if there is any certain relationship between these loops and iterations in design research? More in depth information like this would most likely improve the prototype evaluation and therefore probably clarify necessary changes which in turn should reduce the number of iterations.

During the lecture with Haibo Li, he talked a lot about ideas. More precisely, how to come up with-, how to filter- and how to evaluate an idea.  He mentioned five so called basic questions about different aspects you have to think about while trying to further develop an idea. One of these questions, “Is the timing right?” caught my interest. How do we really know if the timing is right? Nowadays it seems to be rather tricky to actually develop something relatively new. For instance, look at all these applications for phones. Basically it´s impossible to get an idea and further implement it that differ from others.  To be honest the timing seems to be right promptly after essentially huge technologies are developed like Internet or more concrete smart phones. Then we are able to develop something to a comparatively new platform that hasn´t been completely exploited yet.