Theme 5

I published this around lunchtime on Friday but it seems it ended up in the draft-section. Unlucky I guess.

Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration
by: Shafiq ur Réhman, Jiong Sun, Li Liu, and Haibo Li

1.      How can media technologies be evaluated?

I thought this a tricky question, because my initial thought is that media technologies are being measured and evaluated based on success. Therefore I didn’t think that the application of Haibo, et al. (2008) was something that struck me as a success. An interesting concept - yes, but put in a broader mainstream usability discourse - no. But on second thought I know that media scholar Geert Loveink (2012) in his qritique of networks and social media argues against the success argument in evaluating media and media technology because it tends to promote the drones of Plato in the Republic.

So how could media technologies be evaluated? Well in my opinion maybe in a combination between uniqueness, success and usability and also with some interdependency between the three.

2.      What role will prototypes play in research?

I think that this depends on the research conducted. In media research when you’re investigating or evaluating an artifact or product a prototype plays an important role because of it’s ability to create an understanding of the essence or the ontology of the artifact (Saffer, 2010). I do not believe that it’s so much important when you’re investigating behavior or psychology in media use or in media technology research. But in the case of design-research I do believe it’s important to actually have a prototype to bind your findings to. So maybe in a way to build some empirical consensus on a design project you have to include a prototype (Fernaeus, Y lecture 2012-11-21). 

3.      Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

I think I will answer this question with the statement made above, to actually build some kind of empirical consensus (Fernaeus, Y lecture 2012-11-21). This concept though of empirical measured data in a design-context do sparkle some questions from my point of view. Why not distinguish between the phenomenology of the conducted design that it is actually possible to build adequate data around and the concept of empirical research when it comes to design-research?

The EDIT-update.

So the article I’ve chose for the reading is Semantic-based information retrieval in support of concept design by Setchi, Tang & Stankov (2010) published in the journal Advanced Engineering Informatics (Impact factor on a five year basis 2.041).

Theory is being used to guide the reader and to introduce the concepts of the paper (to build a prototype called TREND that guide car-designers in their research for inspiration before a new project using semantic indexing of images from previous design-work). The Theory methodology is maybe a bit unbalanced on the one hand the explanation and Theory of semantics is covered thoroughly the bit about design and the design-process is just explained through earlier works from other authors therefore lacking the understanding of design as a principle.

The method the authors have used is prototype testing and they then had focus groups evaluating the prototype. The pros being that it were actually car designers evaluating the prototype and that the car-designers used the prototype as a complement in their work for a month.

I’ve learned that conducting design-research seems to be a fun way of conducting research. But I believe that it’s really time consuming because you have to build a prototype and depending on the complexity of the prototype it feels like something hardly executed in bachelor or master thesis.

Word count: 675

References:
Dan Saffer, Designing For Interaction 2^nd Edition, 2010
Plato, The Republic
Geert Loveink, Networks Without a Cause: A Qritique of Social Media (2012)
Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration
by: Shafiq ur Réhman, Jiong Sun, Li Liu, and Haibo Li (2008)
Semantic-based information retrieval in support of concept design by Setchi, Tang & Stankov (2010)