Theme 5

This week’s assignment consisted of two design research papers. The first one was co-written by Haibo Li, our new Media technology professor, in 2008 – ”Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration.” and the second one was a choice of our own. 

In the first paper the authors present a new way of assimilating football games on mobile devices. They use a mockup to conduct a user study where they test and evaluate their product. By conducting a user study to test out their system they can detect problems and issues at an early stage, which is really important when developing a product. In this case the product has a commercial value as well, this makes the user study even more important. It’s also necessary to think about what kind of people are involved in the user study and that they fit the target group the product is aiming for. 

When developing a new product, as in this case, it’s also important to ask questions whether the product is actually realizable and feasible. Using a proof of concept prototype could do this. The purpose of a proof of concept prototype is to verify that the idea, concept or theory is useful. The prototype is not intended to serve as an early version of the final product but can rather be quite small and may not even be complete. In the user study conducted in the paper the prototype is in one way a proof of concept prototype since they get feedback from the users regarding the usefulness of the product. By using this evaluation method they can verify whether their product is useful and has a customer base. 

The second article that I read was an article written by my bachelor thesis advisor Karrie Karahalios – ”Social Mirrors as Social Signals: Transforming Audio into Graphics” and was published in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (impact factor: 1.411). The reason why I chose this article is because I find that it describes a design research project quite well.

A social mirror is a visualization using three specific properties. The visualization is shown from a third person perspective, showing changes in real-time and making patterns and trends visible in group conversations. The aim of the paper is to:

-       Visualize content creation within groups over time.

-       Create a better topic classifier for human conversation using human-computer dialogue.

In the paper the researchers present the results of a set of user studies that were conducted. Having a user group trying out the system helps in future research concerning how conversation visualizations can play a part in creative thinking, brainstorming, idea formation etc. To investigate what signals and cues are important in communication visualization the researchers base their knowledge on the social– signaling theory.

What I learned about design research from this paper was that even though you might have a hypothesis about the results of a design technology there might also be other results and applications for the product that weren’t considered to begin with.