Theme 5 - Reflections

 
So this week is the last theme week as the course draws towards its end. The theme for the week was about Design Research and it was quite interesting I thought. What is design research and how does it differ from “regular” research? At Monday we had a lecture with Media Technology's new professor Haibo Li that I actually haven't seen up until now, so just that was a reason to go. The lecture was kind of a mash up of what he has done in his life, but also about “out of the box” thinking as engineers. He warned us about common missteps as an engineer in the working life, and gave us tips about taking a step back and reflect over what you do. The lecture itself was kinda slow pace with lots of PowerPoint slides and anecdotes. I didn't feel that it gave anything that we hadn’t heard before. Or if i rephrase, I didn't think the lecture connected that much with this weeks theme.

We also had a seminar where we looked at every ones research paper for the week and tried to describe the different steps of prototype design that each paper went through. This was for me quite interesting as it gave me a more clearer view of what design research is, and how these types of paper often look like. Also about the iterative nature of design research as it often goes in a circle with constant improvements after testing. This later fell our in a small discussion about design research not being as “sciency” as regular research, and therefore has created the new term “Design science research” to kind of distinguish itself from the masses. Design Research is often sparked from an idea or previous knowledge and often the emphasis in the paper is about actually creating the prototype and evaluating it afterwards. However there isn’t always anything to compare the results with, and therefore this makes the research doubt full as to what has really been concluded. This makes me uncertain with the place for design research as it’s often just about creating something for the sake of doing something. This makes me reconnect with the course i read the previous period about sustainability and how our society feels the need for inventing things that have no real purpose other than the purpose of being.

Theme 5 - Design Research

1. How can media technologies be evaluated?

Media Technologies can be evaluated in lots of different way because media technology involves so much. It can be everything from a web page on the Internet, or a educational interface to a cellphone app or an . So it depends a lot on what you want to evaluate and in what situation. Media technologies are often evaluated through user tests or expert testing to try out the usability of a system. If its more of a physical product, its usually more end user testing so that you actually get the impression from the future users.

2. What role will prototypes play in research?

Prototypes role in research can be different in my mind to commercial prototyping. As in the text to this weeks theme “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” They create a prototype for merely research purposes. There’s no intention of this prototype to become a selling product in the way they develop and produce it, because its a prototype only for finding data and creating a model in their research. And thus It differs from normal prototyping when a prototype is a way to create your nearly finished product and try it out in a near finalized form but without taking the risk and going into full production when you are not certain how people will react and what kind of purpose it will fill.

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

A proof of concept prototype is made for exactly what its name states. To find out if your idea can actually be realized, a proof of concept prototype is a good way to do some first step testing and see if this is something you should keep working on.

4. What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

Prototypes are not a finished product, they can be in the end stage of their finalization but still not completely done. If for example the functionality of a product is the most important thing, then the product probably has the functionality part done in a late prototype, but maybe not the design. Limitations of prototypes is that you can never cover all the possibilities. Even thou you do 1000 prototypes something might still go wrong that the producer hasn't accounted for and thus making the prototype a failure.

Paper
I choose the Article a Gesturally Controlled Improvisation System for piano(http://www.researchgate.net/publication/230822280_A_Gesturally_Controlled_Improvisation_System_for_Piano)
In this paper they are trying to make a piano playing experience more intuitive by using gestures to control different effects while playing the piano at the same time. They started with testing a well known concept for motion tracking system called Polhemus 6 degrees of freedom which is a advanced expensive tool. But they later wanted to scale down and make something more portable and began using the Microsof Kinects 3D-camera for tracking the piano players gestures. The Design of the product in this paper was more about usability than stylishness, but the gestures were produced by research about what types of gestures and movements that are natural and keeps the “flow” going wile the piano player plays, instead of using say quick jerky movements they used soft controlled one handed movements for desired effects. I also found a video of the event described in the paper: http://vimeo.com/groups/nime2011/videos/26678719

Reflections - Theme 4

This week was about Qualitative methods. We only had one lecture this week and it was with Ylva Fernaus that was one of the authors in the text “Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses” by Fernaeus, Y. & Jacobsson, M” that we read to this weeks theme. We discussed what methods were used in her paper, and she asked us questions about if we could find any empirical data in the paper and how we would characterize it. Eventually she said that she was actually surprised that their paper had been accepted by the community as she didn’t think it contained enough empirical data, so that was kind of funny. So hearing this makes me not sure what to think about her paper and the Qualitative methods in it when she doesn't think it deserves it herself. However as the homepage said that her lecture was more about bridging over to the next subject about Design Research where I can see this article more fitting.

I could unfortunately not attend the seminar as I was preoccupied and could not reschedule, however I spoke with my classmates and got the feeling for what was said during the seminar. From what they said it was one of the most giving seminars and I wish i could have attended. One thing that came up in the discussion where about content analysis (CA) and more about who can do a content analysis and what it really is.

I think that I’m personally more familiar with quantitative methods than qualitative as all the previous projects I've done have used fairly simple data collection through surveys with grading evaluation. However it seems that a lot of people have done more qualitative research in their Bachelor thesis, and since I’ve yet to done mine, hopefully I’ll experience this myself this spring.

I choose the paper: User performance with trackball-mice 
(Poika Isokoskia, b,Roope Raisamoa, Benoît Martinb,Grigori Evreinova)
(http://www.sciencedirect.com.focus.lib.kth.se/science/article/pii/S0953543806001391)
from the journal: Interacting with Computers Volume 19, Issue 3, May 2007, Pages 407–427
with an impact factor of: 1.233

This article is about a study for finding the different levels of performance in a variety of trackball and multi-pointer mice.
The qualitative methods used in this paper are for example their experiments that are well though out and performed in such a way that they yield more qualitative data than quantitative.Three out of the 4 experiments consisted of different people, in experiment 3 they used the same people as in experiment 2. The persons who participated had almost to none experience in using trackball-mouses and were given a set of tasks to complete with as high accuracy as possible in such short time as possible.
The study was quite extensive and done in steps at different times to get very accurate results. The paper also has well documented methods with equations as how to replicate and redo the experiments.
The overall results yielded that two handed configuration with trackball in the non dominant hand had the best results. However the difference wasn't that big of a gain to make the effort and try to learn how to properly use a trackball.
The people who were selected for these experiments were all academics who already are very familiar with computers in their daily work, and being academics they are probably used to new types of challenges and adapts quickly. However they were all entry level trackball-users so this study mostly showed how a person that is used to a normal mouse can handle a trackballmouse and possibly become more efficient. If the study had included high ability trackballusers it would probably yielded more concrete data.

About the paper “Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses” by Fernaeus, Y. & Jacobsson, M.,

This article was about physical programming and with that I mean for usage in things that are more everyday and doesn’t necessarily have screen for example. One example in the article was about a system called “actDress” that involved changing physical things on for example a robot, and thus also changing the behavior of said robot. IN the examples in the text there was this robot dinosaur that when they put a pyjama on it, it became sleepy. This was done with the help of RFID tags that is something that is becoming increasingly more popular. For me this article felt more like a proof of concept article that shows the future possibilities of “physical programming”, and this might be something we will see more of in the near future.

Theme 3: Reflections

This week was a super busy week for me as I was working with the student fair for companies called Armada. This took up all of my time so I haven't really had much thought for anything else. However i managed to get away to go to the lecture by Martha Cleveland-Innes and listen to what she had to say. It was interesting to have a lecture with someone whom you've read an article from, and as she brought up things that were in the paper it was easier to relate to what she was talking about. What I got out of the lecture that exceeded the paper were mostly ideas and methods about reliability and validity in research and how to separate them to really understand if you got the results you think you did. This was however the only lecture of the week, and since we didn't have a “normal” seminar I found that it felt quite one sided, and I would have liked to get the discussion that we usually have on the seminars.

There was also a lab about SPSS that i unfortunately didn't have time to go and do, but apparently there was some technical errors so it didn't sound like I missed much anyways. But I will try this out some other days as there was a link uploaded with instructions of how to.

On the topic of Quantitative vs Qualitative methods, we read two texts that were about these two, and I found the “new” technique with mixed method quite interesting and even thou its supposedly much harder to work with and design, its something that I hopefully get to see or work with in the near future as it would be very nice to get a first hand experience with how it works.

Theme 3: Quantitative Methods

Theme 3: Quantitative Methods

In the first text by Lowenthal, P. R. & Leech, N. (2009). Mixed research and online learning: Strategies for improvement. They talked about different way of performing research and culminating data by a new method that they’ve come up with. This is called the mixed method and it combines both quantitative data and qualitative data, where the differences are that in quantitative data you gather a large amount of “simpler” questions which are easily described with a value for example. How good was this Hamburger? 1-10, Where as Qualitative data is a much more abstract measurement where you go in depth with you questions and don’t have a predefined answering table. For example: What did this hamburger make you feel, and why? By combining these both methods Lowenthal & Leech tries to make research much more accurate and more relevant. The paper mentions that this method will increase in popularity in the near future and if so, the overall quality of research on online learning will increase. To conduct a mixed research is more complicated than doing either qualitative or quantitative research by themselves, this might be because its a relative new way of researching, but for it to really take of, researchers must really try this new method out.

The second text: Cleveland-Innes, M. & Campbell P. Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment. Was about finding out if emotions exists in an online learning environment, and if so, how to best utilise them. The existence of emotions in online learning helps to explain and understand how to better form an educational frame that encourages and endeavours students to perform better in online learning environments. The study concluded that emotions do exist in online learning environments and that it can play as a factor for both sides, as it can either be a negative where the students feel sad or anxious, but also work as a positive with feelings of happiness and accomplishment.

Online learning environments or E-environments is still a fairly new platform that hasn't had the great impact many people predicted. With new platforms and environments comes new challenges that I think are the reasons why it hasn’t really taken yet. But as the area matures and the environments gets done the way its supposed to it might become a real competitor with traditional learning environment. And finding out that emotions play a social role in this subject is an important step to making it work the best it can.

Theme 2 - Reflections

This week we got to learn more about theory and what theory really is, and maybe more important, found out what is not theory as this is a common misconceptions in student and more scientific papers. We learned about different categories for theories as to what type of theory they might be. Theory is often a mislabeled word that is thrown about it common conversation where a person says that he or she has a theory when in fact its probably just a hypothesis taken from the believes or predictions from that person. and not a scientific study with underlying logical train of thought.

Theory is something abstract and is pretty hard to define and pinpoint. We had a discussion i the seminar about when a hypothesis becomes a theory, if any one person is even able to have a theory, or that it has to be recognized by others even thou its actually “correct”, for example My group brought up in the seminar about Copernicus having a theory of the sun being the center of our solar system instead of the earth. Today this is well known and considered fact, but when he came up with this people laughed at him and it wasn't until much later that people understood that he was right. So my question was, did he come up with a theory back then, or was it at that time only a hypothesis that years later when it became recognised transcended into a theory?

On the whole I thought that the subject was very interesting, even thou it asked more questions than it did answered them. Compared to the previous theme this felt much more relevant for our studies as this will be directly applicable when i write my bachelor and master thesis.