Theme: 5 Reflection

The theme during week 41 was “Design Research”, a very interesting topic in my opinion. I found all the paper interesting, especially the one by Haibo Li. The following were the paper I read:

• Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration by Réhman, Sun, Li and Liu.
• Finding design qualities in a tangible programming space by Fernaeus & Tholander
• Differentiated Driving Range by Lundström.

Unfortunately I was not able to participate in the lectures, because I had other mandatory lectures in Future of Media that I had to prioritize. Since there was no seminar last week I felt like it was hard to reflect on this theme. Therefor I asked some of my classmates if they could share their notes from the lectures with me, and I also discussed the theme with some of them.

The lecture on Wednesday with Haibo Li was about how to go from an idea to selling it. He described the process in five steps: How to come up with an idea, how to filter the idea, how to validate a good idea, how to evaluate the idea, and marketing and selling the idea. From what I have heard and what I have discussed, the lecture on Wednesday was really good and it feels like I could have learned a lot from it. But during the circumstances it feels like I have learned at least something-

It all comes down to defining a problem, that step is almost more important than solving the problem. Li said that you will much likely get a better solution if you spend 90% of your effort in defining the problem and only 10 % to actually solve it, than the other way around. When you have your problem you can ask yourself the questions, does it address a real pain point? And Is it possible to do with existing technology?  Li was also bringing up the importance of evaluate the idea and test its usability. Three main things to look at is effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction. A good way to do this is by designing a prototype.

The lecture on Friday with Anders Lundström was about prototypes, what they are and how to design one. I am currently taking the course Interaction design 2 that is held by Lundström. In his course we have discussed the same topic and also been doing some prototyping. One of the main purposes with making prototypes is to gain knowledge. You want your prototype to bee a tool to get answers to your research problems. I believe that last week I have not learned anything new about prototypes, in addition to the blog post “ Theme 5: Design Research”.