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