Reflections on Theme 5 – Design Research

The topic for this week was design research in the subject of media technology. Haibo Li our new professor held a lecture on the topic from an engineering perspective. He explained strategic ways to approach the different stages from idea to prototype. The most important step according to Haibo was to distinguish whether an idea is a bad, good or great idea. By asking the right questions and know how to define the problem in the beginning of a research project a lot of time can be saved in the end. Haibo had his on statement on this matter:

“Spend most of the time defining the problem and less time solving it, then you become great” – Haibo Li

This might seem trivial and obvious but it’s actually really difficult, the human mind is often looked and we have preconceptions about what we think is right. This makes it hard to think outside the box and approach problems in an objective way.

Haibo explained some concrete and important methods on how to evaluate an idea, in the field of engineering. Using technology and mathematics to determine if the idea is feasible is the first easiest step. By doing this in the beginning it’s much easier to know whether it’s a good idea or not. Secondly it’s important to ask yourself if it’s a breakthrough technology and finally if it’s a winning business idea. If these steps are all met you have a great idea. There are also three attributes that you should look for when evaluating the idea, these are effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.

He summarized his lecture in nine words that were really useful to have in mind:

“Do the right things and do the things right” - Haibo

At the seminar we continued our discussion concerning design research, and compared different design research methods that we’d come across in our articles. During the seminar it became obvious that design research is a broad subject that can concern many different topics. We therefore narrowed it down a little bit to make it more graspable and focused mainly on design science research. Based on our own article each one of us made a visualization of the design research cycle.

Below is one example of how a design research cycle could look like.

Havner, H. (2007) “A three cycle view of design science research”, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 19 (2): pp. 87-92