So this week we focused on Design Research and sadly I think this weeks theme wasn’t that great in terms of execution.
Like previous weeks we had a few texts to read and this week it was three different papers and I found the reading part of the theme the most engaging and interesting. I find design to be a very interesting area since you can design something in so many different ways and each of them have its weaknesses/strengths depending on what you are designing for. Design is something I could see myself working with in the future, and I’m not talking about artistic design as in use this color here, this font here etc, but rather designing functionality. So when it comes to the theme I found it very relevant and interesting and even if the texts might’ve been a little out dated I still found them interesting.
The difference between this week and previous weeks was that we didn’t have a seminar during this theme which I found very unfortunate. We instead had two lectures and usually I find the lectures ok when it comes to how much I learn, how engaged I am and how much they interest me and the seminars is the best part of the themes. I’m a person who loves discussing things and since that is exactly what you do on the seminars naturally I will find them more fun.
This week however I think the lectures were less than desirable when it comes to content and execution. The first lecture with Haibo Li was hard to follow because I felt like he tried to talk about everything there is about design research in two hours, and that is very hard. He changed the focus of the lecture so many times it just ended up being confusing. You could see that this is something Haibo thinks is fun and I believe he got a little carried away.
The second lecture also had some problems because the person who should give it ended up being sick at the time so Anders Lundström had to jump in and do the lecture with just a few hours notice. I don’t think it was that wierd that this lecture didn’t end up being great and I feel like I learned a lot even though it was very improvised. We talked about prototyping, why you use prototypes in design research, what empirical data is and proof of concept. I had some knowledge about these areas before but I feel that I now have a more detailed understanding of them. But as I said earlier, I think the fact that there were no seminar prevented me and a few others to really embrace the theme.
Hi Jonathan,
SvaraRaderaDesign research seems to be a very broad concept for which there doesn't exist any general definition yet. This got quite clear during Anders Lundströms lecture when we discussed different takes on the term "design". I agree with you that Lundströms lecture was had a smaller scope and therefore could get into details about different aspects of design research, but I also think that Haibo's lecture, though a little bit unstructured, presented several good aspects of design research in general. For example i found the 9:1 effort ratio quite intriguing when it comes to problem solving, and that was something that I hadn't thought of before!
Hi,
SvaraRaderaI agree with you that Haibo explained a very broad topic, but still I learnt that the definition of the problem gives you the possible solution, and it is a very important task in order to come up with the good idea. It would be nice that you would have explained a bit in detail what you have learnt during this week. For instance, this week I learn that empirical data could be even process and that method is a way to explain data but the method will not give the answer, the analysis is the core process in order to get knowledge. Also, it was new for me that designing research is based on experiment, it could be, but not all the times. Reading you pre-blog post, I was wondering if in chosen research paper is written anything about piloting of interview questions? In my case, the scholars did not mention anything about the pre-test of questionnaires that might be a drawback of research.
The distinction you draw between artistic design and functional design is interesting. I have also reflected on this distinction, since in my experience the two are sometimes conflated in discussions. Design is not only how pretty something looks, but the functional design shapes the whole concept of how something is to be used. It is a very important part of any product – important enough that it often should be the starting point. I think the papers of this theme illustrated this point quite well, since they used existing technologies but through design implemented completely new functionality.
SvaraRaderaI think it is legitimate to think about the lectures the way you do. Like you I was not very satisfied with the content of the first lecture. It was not really an enlightening idea for me to focus on the problem definition. Nevertheless, I guess that this was useful take-away-knowledge from the first lecture. But I struggled with the remaining content of the lecture in terms of what I have learned. Since I think that there were some critical points in Haibo’s lecture I am not willing to accept the lecture’s content as given knowledge.
SvaraRaderaHi Jonathan!
SvaraRaderaI agree that this weeks theme was a bit disappointing. I do however think that it's good that you feel that you've gathered more knowledge about the concepts at hand. That's the whole point of taking a course right? To learn something from it.
I think that it's good that you dare to be honest about how you felt about the lectures, though I think that in a reflection like this, you might want to try and focus a bit more on what you've learnt and less on what was disappointing. And if I am to comment on one last thing, I think that your language in this post is a tiny bit to casual for the context (that you are graded upon it, if you are, I'm not completely sure)
I do think that from a REFLECTION point of view, yours is good, and you get an extra plus for highlighting some of the key words.
Keep up the good job!