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.

Theme 2: Theory

Theory

1. What is Theory? Theory is the underlying logical explanation of for example one or more hypothesis. It’s the “why” in an answer to a question, its an explanation to an observed pattern. Theory is for explaining “why” something is.

But what is not Theory? As we read in the text “What theory is not” we find that it’s quite a lot actually. The 5 main points are data, references, list of variables, diagrams and hypotheses. Data is not theory as it’s merely observations of occurrences and not explanations as to why these things are occurring. References is not theory either as they themselves do not contain the so important explanation to an occurrence as well, its just points to where someone else might have had a theory but without the possibility to absorb the explanation first hand in for example a paper. Hypotheses are mere assumptions or predictions and can not be theory without logical arguments as to why this hypotheses came true. etc
However these 5 might be parts to help creating a theory, but them by their selves are not theory.

2. I choose the paper “A Computational model of “Active Vision” for Visual Search in Human-Computer interaction” (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07370024.2011.625237)
from the journal HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION that has an impact factor of 1.476

The goal of the paper is to make way for a model that is suited for active-vision interfaces. The paper has been made around 4 central questions regarding just that. When do the eyes move? Where do the eyes move? What can be perceived in a fixation? and what information is integrated between eye movements? The paper answers all these questions using already know models to find the best one to predict eye movement. I think its fairly hard to categorise this as I’ve never done it before, but if i have to i think it might be a nr 1 in the table provided by the text from Gregor, and that would be Analysis as this paper uses existing models and analyses them i search for the beast match for a “future” active-vision model. It does however answer some questions using these models, and that one might say is some kind of prediction or explanation. But as it mainly focuses on testing other models i categorised it as Analysis.


3. The benefits are that using the Analysis model is that its maybe easier to understand as a reader since it’s step by step based with description and analysis of the subject. And by doing just that you can combine more models or theories as in my text where they analyse quite a few different models to find the most suitable for the task.
The limitations of this theory model is that it doesn’t really explain or predict anything. It just takes it for what it is and repacks it and thus not generating that much new information. Another limitation connected to the paper might be that since they focused around these 4 questions it was also “only” what they did. There might have been a lot more to the subject that they could have learned, but by focusing so narrowly they might have missed things.

Thoughts on Theme 1

Week 44

This first week was divided into two different topics whereas one of them was more in line with our education where we looked at research papers and journals to find out what is “good” and “high quality” information. We learned about Impact factors that is a measurement to evaluate how “good” or how “important” a journal is. And we had to find a journal which had an impact factor with a value over 1, as this was considered a “good” journal. And from these journals we had to choose a paper that we thought was interesting. These papers however do not have impact factors, but only the journal. So to say that a certain paper is of good quality or not is a little bit harder when we don't have a grading system for it. Another thing about journals is that they have to be around for a while to have good values, since it takes at least a year for an impact factor to be calculated, and if a journal has been around longer it’s also more probable that its been cited more and thus gained a higher impact factor. For me this was the first time on KTH that we got to read some research papers that were connected to our field of study, and this was very nice and i do think that I will have use for this in the future when I’m going to write my master thesis. The instructions as how to find these papers could have been a lot better tho as I spend quite some time just getting a feel for the system.

The second part was more philosophical based and talked about what is knowledge and can we ever truly know something? And for this we read a “short” book from Bertrand Russel that was called “The Problems of Philosophy (1912)”. A book that even thou quite old, had information about the way we perceive things that I found is still relevant for today’s society. I thought that even though it was a lot to take in, in such short time, and that we should probably have read it several times to get a deeper understanding, It was very interesting. I’m still not quite sure as where this fits into our education, but it makes us maybe pause a little and ask ourselves more questions.