Theme 5: Post-reflections

Defining the problem

During his lecture Haibo Li (2012) talked about design research. One thing that stuck to my mind and one that I don’t think gets as much attention as it should is that the research question/problem should be carefully thought through. He mentioned that some researchers spend too much time on trying to solve the problem instead of actually thinking about what the problem is and how they can change the definition of the problem to make it easier to solve.

I first came in touch with the importance of research questions during the bachelor thesis. There we were encouraged to spend a lot of time to narrow down our question, and think it through, to make it as concrete and easy to answer as possible. The research question helped us direct the research and made it much more focused on a specific area. If we hadn’t narrowed it down I believe it would have been much harder to know what to study and which target group we were looking at. A good research question/problem always helps the whole paper and research in the right direction and makes it easier to conduct. A suiting term for this subject that I would like to mention is, to quote Aristotle, “Well begun is half done” (Social Research Methods, 2006).

When to create a prototype

Li (2012) also mentioned that prototypes should be created with care and with a lot of research backing up its use. He showed examples of products that had been studied theoretically before having a prototype created. Mathematic formulas had been used and solved, which showed that a prototype would work and would be relevant to build.

When dealing with prototypes in a design research it is important to have done enough background research and confirm with theory that a prototype could work and would be worth creating. Advanced prototypes may take time to develop and can also cost a lot of money creating. When doing a design in a company both time and money could be scarce and shouldn’t be wasted, thus the importance of thorough work with theory in the subject before developing any advanced prototypes. Prototypes can of course be made with different complexity and simple ones could more easily be created without using much time and money. Many prototypes, with different level of work, could be created during an iterative design process (Wells-Clarke, 2010) if the time and money do exist.

References,

Li, H. (2012). Lecture, 2012-11-26.

Social Research Methods (2006). Problem Formulation. http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/probform.php. Downloaded 2012-11-26.

Wells-Clarke, R. (2010). User Interface Prototypes Save Time and Money. http://www.ddsn.com/blogs/digital-insight/user-interface-prototypes-save-time-and-money.aspx. Downloaded 2012-11-26.