Theme 5 - After

Reflections on Theme 5

This final theme was about Design Research, a third kind of research next to the more traditional Quantitative and Qualitative kinds.

Out of the kinds and methods we’ve gone through this is pretty unique in that it adds an earlier step. The basis is that the researchers have a new idea or a new product of some kind, and the research is based around this artifact, whatever it may be.

Commonly the artifact is put through hands on practical testing throughout the design research process, as made evident by both the paper that everyone read as well as the one I chose myself. Both are examples of a new idea being presented in different test environments, where the objective is to employ testing to tell whether the artifact is good and improvable in order to see real production.

I was abruptly unable to attend either the seminar and lecture this week, but I have gotten to hear some summations about what went on.

The seminar was similar in shape to the two previous ones, where there were miniature-workshops treating the weeks subject. The class was divided into groups that talked through processes of design research. Material was put together during these sessions and were put into the course wiki.

The guest lecture of course also was about design research. I learned about it after the fact but through the descriptions I got I still feel that I may have understood that the main point of the lecture was about identifying the correct problem out of many - and solving it specifically.