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.