Theme 5 (pre)

Theme 5

PART 1

1. How can media technologies be evaluated?
2. What role will prototypes play in research?
3. Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?
4. What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?
5. How can design research be communicated/presented?

1. The way I think that media technology can be evaluated is from thoughts and reactions from one of the user from the target group. It’s always hard to know how a person will interact with the product, you might think that they will use it in a certain way but then they don’t, those kind of evaluation I think is important for media technology.

2. Prototypes is a huge part of researches. It is something that creates an idea into an object, which is obviously necessary to try an idea in practice. It’s hard to know and imagine how an idea will work if you don’t test it, and with a prototype it gives credibility to the research article. In Haibo’s text “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” the prototype plays a huge part of the article, if they didn’t have a prototype the article couldn’t say anything about how it would work.
3. It’s necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype to try your idea. You might have an idea of something which you don’t know how the target group will respond to, then it’s good to create a proof of concept prototype to try that idea before fully taking that idea into practice and creating object that no one wants.  
4. The characteristic of a prototype is that it’s close to being the final product, but has some drawbacks, because it hasn't been tested enough. The limitation is that, since it’s not manufactured in a big scale, the prototype cost relatively much for being one object.
5. The best way that a design research can be presented is through a prototype. With reactions and observations from the target group regarding to different aspects of the prototype. One thing that I think is a necessary part of the presentation of the prototype is to publish pictures and description of the prototype, so that the reader can understand the prototype and build up an opinion about it.    

PART 2

How does a collaborative setting differ from a single user setting as regards methodology used and the results obtained?

The simple answer is that a collaborative setting involves two or more persons while a single user setting involve, obviously, just one person. The result is more straight forward from the single user setting, because it’s just how that person thinks, acts, answers etc. The collaborative setting results contains more dimensions, and can result in a more in-depth result.

How can qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study complement each other?

Quantitative study can answer the question “what?” and qualitative can answer the question “why/how?”. For example in the text “Auditory feedback in haptic collaborative interfaces” Eva-Lotta and colleagues use a quantitative method to determine whether or not the auditory feedback made the task at hand easier and then they used a qualitative method to explain in what ways the auditory cues play a role for the collaboration in multimodal environments.  

How can using both subjective and objective methods give a better understanding of a phenomenon?

Objective methods are measurements and collecting of data. Subjective methods are ones thoughts, beliefs and experience regarding one thing. To better understand a phenomenon you need both collected data (objective) and you need to interpret those results with your own experience (subjective) to set the data into a context.