Theme 5: Design research Reflection

This week we attended two lectures, one given by Haibo Li and one given by  Eva-Lotta Sallnäs. We read  3 texts in addition to this: 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, . Moll, J. and Sallnäs, E-L. (2013). "A haptic tool for group work about geometrical concepts engaging blind and sighted pupils." ACM Transaction on Accessible Computing. 4(4), and 1-37, Huang, Y., Moll, J., Sallnäs, E-L., Sundblad, Y. (2012). "Auditory feedback in haptic collaborative interfaces." International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 70(4), 257-270.
Haibos lecture touched upon the importance of choosing the right and easy problem. It's more important to find a problem that is of importance and that has a convincing solution than finding a problem which lacks obvious solutions. An enforced example is two men being chased by a tiger where the wrong kind of problem is: How do I outrun the tiger in order to escape and the easy problem is: How do I manage to outrun the other man in order to escape. It's about asking the right questions. Still if you've too many ideas, which one to choose, Haibo briefly discussed how you could differentiate between "great ideas" and "big ideas". Then how you can validate the idea with the help of prototyping. To then evaluate the prototype you can measure the usability: efficiency, satisfaction, and effectiveness. Other things to think about in regards of evaluation are that mathematics and statistics helps us find (and describe) exact correlations that otherwise wouldn't have been found so easy.  He gave an example of Analysis of variance (ANOVA), a relative comparative way of finding correlations between independent and dependent variables. At the end he briefly discussed the importance of communicating your technology ideas as an entrepreneur when presenting them to people outside the technological world.

Sällnas Lecture was kind of deeply involving her research in collaborative haptics. She mentioned that collaborative data resulted in a lot of free data. An example from the lecture: In order to measure the way haptic feedback affects people she measured presence which is divided in social and virtual presence. She measured virtual prescence with the help of an existing scale, made for this purpose. However, there were no scale to measure social presence  so they had to define social presence and then build an own way to measure it. This example shows that there are not measures for everything and that it's possible to get around this. She also mentioned that there are general ways to measure things in order to put the in relation to other studies, for example by using Fitt's-law-task on input-output devices  you can put your input-output device into relation with other input-output devices outside the study. She discussed the importance of defining the study's keywords, collaborative setting as well as the relation between quantitative and qualitative data. All this with her own research as the base.

After the reflections before and the after this week's theme I think that I've learned quite a bit. Especially from reading the texts and reflecting around this week's questions.