Theme 5 - Before

Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration

Réhman, S. et al. (2008). IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

The paper is a design research where the subject is using a tactile interface to communicate with an end user. The information being communicated is a live feed from a football game. They used a prototype for the evaluation - by connecting an external vibration device to a mobile phone.

1. If you are evaluating an idea of any kind that is not directly comparable to something that exists you may need to build a prototype of it.  In this case the individual parts of the vibrator-technology they research exist but not in the concept they wished to evaluate.

4. Prototypes are inherently quite different from finished products, though they may be at various stages of completion when used. If we look at the prototype used in this example it had all the functions that were relevant to the end-user - so its usage can be said to have been representative of how the finished product would have behaved. I would say that the limitations depend on how rudimentary the prototype is. I think it’s important that the prototype be usable enough to function as a substitute for the finished product, at least regarding the parts of it that are being evaluated. Another limit may be regarding at what stage you use the prototype. Other forms of testing early on may give you information about your artifact that you could take into consideration before building your prototype, thus allowing you to use a more complete and adapted prototype in a later stage of evaluation. Without having to spend time and effort assembling prototypes of different iterations if early results are unpredicted and send you on a different path than you foresaw.

One Mouse per Child: interpersonal computer for individual arithmetic practice

C. Alcoholado et al. Journal of Computer Assited Learning, issue 4 August 2012.

This paper explores a sort of new technology that is mainly software based but hardware reliant. They posit a system to allow multiple students to use the same computer in a classroom environment, by providing them all a mouse to interact with it (through an interface displayed on a common projector screen).

The idea is to use it for mathematical exercise, where normally the school would be limited to students taking turns on one computer - with this system they had up to 36 students doing their exercises at the same time on one computer. This would greatly benefit poorer areas that are unable to normally facilitate enough computers for their students, because the material cost would be very low (estimated at $1 per student/year).

For the data collection they used Qualitative observation and Quantitative analysis. The quantitative part was mainly done by taking tests at various points to show if the students improved in arithmetic by using the system. The results improved a massive amount between the first and second sessions with the system - which suggested that the technology threshold was quickly reached and that the students quickly became accustomed to using the system.

From reading both of these articles I think I reached a basic understanding of how design research is conducted, and I hope to learn more during the following week. Common among these two papers is the implementation of a prototype and its use in testing. I can foresee issues arising if you are not careful with when you implement a prototype, since early data sampling with other methods may give you useful information to consider before constructing your prototype. It therefore seems reasonable to me that design research methods would be most beneficial when used in combination with other methods.