Theme 5: Design research

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

Réhman, Sun, Liu and Li (2008) present a design research about how vibration in a mobile phone can be used to follow the events of a football game. For this research they created a prototype that later could be evaluated through tests with users.

By doing a prototype the authors were able to practically make tests and write about the results, compared to just analyzing theory and empirical evaluations of the subject area. Generally, by creating prototypes you have a possibility to make more practical evaluations and confirm other more “soft” types of data, like theory and data from quantitative and qualitative methods. I believe that if you have the possibility and time to create a prototype it is always useful. More information can be gathered and possible difficulties and problems will also present themselves clearer.

While presenting a design research in a paper it is important to be thorough with descriptions so that the reader easily can follow along with decisions taken and the design from beginning to end. In the paper by Réhman et al. (2008) they brought up a few technical terms that I’m not very familiar with, and I would assume others also had problem grasping every detail, but it is still important to mention these details. By being detailed in the presentation of the design you direct yourself to as many research areas as possible. Some might be interested in the more technical aspects, while others might focus on more humanistic parts of the research. Even though I didn’t understand every single detail in the paper by Réhman et al. I still was able to understand how the prototype worked and how the design research was conducted. If you write this type of paper I argue that this is important. The reader should be able to follow along the design even though the person isn’t educated in every aspect of the concerning research areas.

Designing social videogames for educational uses

I chose the paper Designing social videogames for educational uses, written by González-González & Blanco-Izquierdo (2011), from the journal Computers & Education. The paper is about how to use computer games, more specifically MMORPG, as a method for learning. A lot of theory is brought up, which consist of information about video games, learning, collaborative learning with computers and examples of how different games can be seen as good for teaching various values. The theory is thoroughly described and covers many concerning areas before the presentation of the design and prototype. The theory gives a good background throughout the paper and it almost feels that the authors mention to much general theory in some parts instead of focusing on the specific areas for the design research.

The prototype was created with the help of the game Neverwinter Nights. In this MMORPG, the authors evaluated how users could learn collaboratively by playing together. Different scenarios in the game present the users, students in this case, with scenarios that each contain different tasks that has to be solved collaboratively. The authors used both quantitative and qualitative methods to gather data about how the students worked collaborate in the game environment.

Overall, I argue that the design presentation in the paper is adequate. The authors describe how they thought while designing the prototype and how they implemented and evaluated it. One aspect I would have wanted more description of is concrete information about the game and what the users’ goals were during the evaluation. The authors merely presented general information about games as learning environment and didn’t really focus specifically on the game they used in their research. That made it harder to understand some parts of how the evaluation of their prototype was conducted.

References:

González-González, C., Blanco-Izquierdo, F. (2011). Designing social videogames for educational uses. Computers & Education, Volume 58, Issue 1, January 2012, 250–262.

Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008). Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 10(6), 1022-1033.