Theme 5: Design research

Design research

For this theme I have chosen to reflect on the questions What role will prototypes play in research?, Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype? and What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

What role will prototypes play in research?

The roles that prototypes can play in research is either as a tool to test a hypothesis by enabling you to collect data from usage of the prototype that you then can analyse, or it can be the sole purpose of the research to create the prototype and then learn from that experience. In the later case the empirical data of the research is generated by the creation process of the prototype.

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

It could be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype to enable the gathering of quantitative data about the thing you want to explore. Specifically if it is an entirely new thing that doesn’t really exist, like in the case of the mobile vibration to convey information about a football game that Haibo Li with colleagues wrote about in their paper. Without the proof of concept prototype they created they couldn’t really gather the kind of data they did, and maybe they then wouldn’t be able to show the potential of this technology.

What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

Prototypes are characterised by their compromises and limitations compared to finished production designs.
For example, prototypes, unlike production designs, can be limited to only work in specific use cases, like in Haibo Li and his colleagues’ research where their prototype only was made for 10-minutes of a game of football that had been annotated beforehand.
This makes the use of prototypes effective since you can test whatever part of the design you are interested about without having to spend time and money on the other parts. Iterating on that one part by itself is faster than having to rebuild the entire design each iteration.

Further, prototypes can be of low or high fidelity. Low-fidelity prototypes are very easy to implement and iterate upon since they can, for example, be just drawings on papers; high-fidelity prototypes are more like the vibrating mobile prototype from the paper which is a working model of the design, or part of the design.

Qualitative methods based on concepting, tinkering and critique

What is the 'empirical data' in these two papers?

The ‘empirical data’ in Finding design qualities in a tangible programming space by Fernaeus & Tholander is, in short, the lessons they learned and the design qualities they found while iterating their design. This includes what they learned about how to handle:
coupling (e.g. “separation between the [f]ocus of interaction and feedback not always became a disadvantage in the design”),
manipulation (e.g. “what could be accomplished through the manipulations became more important to the design than how the sensory experience of the manipulation would be perceived”), Relation between input and output of the system and Tangibles as representation of digital information.
The ‘empirical data’ in Differentiated Driving Range by Lundström is things such as how including climate control in the driving range visualization improved the design and that it’s hard to get a stable short-term mean speed because of the extent that momentary speed varies (and that this problem can be solved by looking at several different time windows.)

Can practical design work in itself be considered a 'knowledge contribution'?

Practical design work can, in my opinion, in itself be considered a ‘knowledge contribution’ since it is done iteratively and therefore gives some a posteriori knowledge.

Are there any differences in design intentions within a research project, compared to design in general?

I think there are, in many cases, differences in the design intentions.
In a research project the design is supposed to be a tool for conveying your methods and theory, and therefore is often not needed to go past the prototype stage. Design in general has the intentions of in the end generating a full fledged design that is past the prototype stage.

Is research in tech domains such as these ever replicable? How may we account for aspects such as time/historical setting, skills of the designers, available tools, etc? 

I don’t think research in tech domains such as these is replicable because of the aspects brought up; they will never be the same, and therefore if you try to replicate the research some part of it will be different in some way or another.

Are there any important differences with design driven research compared to other research practices?

I would say that the important differences with design driven research compared to other research practices is that design driven research is practical and you have to create something in order to gain new knowledge. In other practices (qualitative and quantitative) you can just analyse something that already is, or create new data yourself and then analyse it.