Theme 5 Design research

The paper Comics, Robotics, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses, Fernaeus and Jacobsson (2009) was about physical communication with robots. The authors dig into how they can use different artifacts and signs to control the computer systems. They call it the actDresses and writes that human computer interaction is getting more important to do research about. So they apply the concept of actDresses to three different cases where they use signs and accessories to communicate with the robots. E.g. the dinosaur falls a sleep when he gets his pajamas. 

 (Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008). Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration.)

How can media technologies be evaluated?
There are two main ways that I know: Consult an expert and let him/her evaluate your product or let people test it. The later is the best in my opinion and especially if you get your costumer group test it. You will get good data on how they used it or their opinions on the product. Who's opinion could be more important than your costumers? If it is the coding you want to test you can always create test programs that run your code and see which alternative is the best. A little like they did in the paper. 

What role will prototypes play in research?
Prototypes play a big role in the research of a new design. Before you put all your money and time into a project it is good to know that the idea is at least tested before hand. In the paper they first tested to see if the idea was any good with the help of a prototype. A prototype should be easy to make but still you should be able to test the functionality. 

What are the characteristics and limitations of prototypes?
A media technology prototype can differ a lot and it depends on what it is supposes to test. Is it the graphic design then you could use power point or if it is the coding then it could be a small program without any graphical content. Things they have in common is that they are easy to build and take short time. They can never really represent the final product. Some functionality might be hard to implement in a prototype. During my bachelor thesis I worked a lot with human computer interaction and design research. I did an application for smartphones and it was demanded from the company that it was going to be very intuitive and easy to use. For that we needed to create a lot of different prototypes, test them and evaluate them. We started off with simple paper prototypes to see if the flow of the app was good and if people understood how to use it and what they thought of it. Later we created an prototype in power point, it was good because we got it on a screen and it looked a lot like the final product but the functions did not really work. This made the testing a bit troublesome since we had to give the testers directions.