Reflection on Theme 5, Design Research

This week we have been focusing on design research. I enjoyed reading the articles this week as the topics were more hands-on with concrete and interesting design ideas.

The lecture with Ylva Fernaeus added depth to the article we read, as she explained their thinking and methods while doing this research study. I think their idea is really clever and could be developed further, especially when it comes to toys, which is a big market with a possible big money-revenue (especially at Christmas time, like when this is written). It made me think of a train set my son had when he was younger. They had developed little plastic (obviously) code bricks that made the train act on a message, realized by two raised bars of different length, which were detected by two press-buttons on the bottom of the train. 

Lego code brick that made the Duplo train stop

My son had lots of fun with these, making the train turn around, stopping and blowing its horn. Using small RFID-sensors built in to stackable code bricks could obviously allow for a bigger variety of interactions, and more detailed messages, maybe two or three bricks together could act as a combined by slightly altered action.

Ylva also had a very simple and concrete way of describing the several steps of research and knowledge. She phrased knowledge as something that you take notice of, which I think was a good description as well as very easy to understand. Your research is then to define this ‘something’ that you have taken notice of, and other people has perhaps not realized its importance or definition, and then to further explore this topic/idea. You then need to communicate and convince other people about the value and truth of this idea of which you have taken notice.      

The idea in Li et al’s article was also very innovative. I am not interested I sports, so I am not sure about this very application of their study, but I am sure that the sense modality can be used for a lot of message transferals in a near future. This will certainly be very important in our very noisy lives of today, not to disturb other people as well as receiving messages in the subway/busy street etc.  

Haibo Li held an entertaining as well as very interesting lecture. His lecture was much more engineering focused and we learned that we can all define a great idea (which he declared corresponds to a billion dollar industry) if we just focus on the real problem. It is also important to have an “elevator pitch” ready to communicate our idea to the right investor. Sounds really simple.

Li gave us a really illustrative example with a hungry bear, on why you need to focus on the “real” problem. The student realized that the answer to the hungry bear problem was that you do not need to outrun the bear, you only need to outrun the professor, as the bear will be happy with one lunch (in other words the professor, if the student was able to outrun him).

As my knowledge of design research before preparing for this week was very low I also learned a lot by reading the blog posts of my peers, as they had reflected on design research, prototypes, and the as Malin Westerlind defined the three factors affecting usability is effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.  

Overall, I think that the blog posts have been a very interesting way to increase my knowledge of theory and method during this course. It has been really interesting to read some very insightful comments about what all my peers have been thinking about on these various topics and the research articles they have chosen.