Theme 5: pre-reflection

We read two papers in preparation for next weeks lectures. They were both interesting and, I think, showed in a good way how design research differs a lot from more analytical, explanative, predictive, et.c., research. That said, I don’t feel that there’s a lot to reflect on before the lectures, since I don’t have any idea of the scope of this theme. I’m going to try to write what has come to my mind without just summarizing the articles’ content. (which would be text, but not so much of a reflection.)

Both papers had interesting discussions regarding human - comupter interaction, especially when it came to the nature of human users in the context of the application. Li’s paper dealt with how human tactility restricts representation with vibrations, and it was apparent that there wasn’t as simple as taking into account how our sense of touch works and then coming up with the best solution. The nature of our sense of touch offered a set of premisses for the design problem, but the ways to come to terms with those could be numerous. Respectively, Farnaeus’s paper had an interesting discussion of how to utilize peoples semiotic knowledge from the areas of comics and fashion when designing new ways to interact with, or program, robots. Here, I thought, that the most interesting part was how familiarity played a big part. Since the mobile football application as well as the robot applications came off as consumer products I can understand how it’s relevant to design with the thought in mind that users should want to use the product without having to get an introduction to it, or practise it beforehand. Still, the football-mobile paper did show that some training was required before you could actually use the prototype effectively. I think it would be interesting to include a paper on designing something that people need to use as well, in contrast to something that people should want to use. The weighing of the different goals would shift if the application was one that aimed at facilitating a neccessary task and doing it effectively, while still being easy enough to learn for the intended user-base.

Also the approach of using familiarity is interesting in another way, because the robot-paper uses familiarity with other concepts, comics and fashion, to design physical programming applications for robots. This makes me think about how novel ideas for applications can have a hard time getting accepted, not because they’re not great ideas, but because they’re unfamiliar and hard to relate to as well as learn. The borrowing of design characteristics from other, unrelated, areas that people are expected to have knowledge about is a way to bring novelty to a design sphere. But, having said that, I think that happens everywhere in technology these days, and – at least when done on a superficial level – it can make me feel a bit sad and unispired with just cross-pollinating ideas to make people engage in old behaviours dressed up in other old behaviours clothes to make it feel novel. On closer thought, I think that mainly goes for entertainment applications. I don’t know, I’ll have to reflect more on this I guess…