Theme 5 Reflection

Unfortunately my migraine held me from going to today’s seminar, but after hearing with the others about the important thing from it the design process is much about prototypes. It is a circular process, when you start with theory, then you create your prototype out of this theory and then you evaluate it by using some kind of user tests. Then you go back and do it all over again. This is as I said in the previous blog post the way to work with design processes.

To create a prototype I don’t think it has to be fully working though. The important thing is that the feature you are supposed to test right now is working. You have to be able to test the correct variable in your prototype testing, and this variable can change depending on which stage in the process you are. In some stage of the design research process you of course have to have a fully working prototype but this can be in a later stage.

Before this theme I thought that maybe I’m not going to do much design research in my area of image and video processing which I am interesting in and that the only ones doing design research are the pure designers. Of course this is not true. All areas of engineering need to make a design research in some way in some stage. All areas of engineering have to make prototypes of their product to be able to find the problems you can’t find out mathematically or theoretically. You have to test everything in real life and not just on the paper. In other sorts of science, like pure social science if don’t think that design research in this form exists though. Here models are developed for human behavior, and this is also tested in real life, but not by prototypes, but by observing and then analyzing. Maybe the prototype step is a step in this big process that isn’t needed or even possible in social science but in all kinds of product creating. 

Theme 5

The article I chose is called “A single-pixel wireless contact lens display” from the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering and it had 2011 an IF of 2.105. This article is about digital contact lenses and the researchers in this article has designed and tested a contact lens with one pixel on a live rabbit. They are using previous theories about wireless communications and led-display and using them together to create the digital contact lens. The hard part here is to be able to make the parts small and still able to work and communicate.

They are building a prototype which they are testing on different kinds of animals, mostly dead but also on one live rabbit. This is so that they can test if the cordless power is harmful or even working and if they can make the pixel working from a distance. In this particular article they have to make a prototype I think. This technique is never tested before and just designs which haven’t been built before. In these kinds of technique you have to come to the step when a prototype is built with all the parts that the researchers or other scientists have worked on for this type of implementation.

The good thing about this article is that I notice that all the different parts of the prototype are well researched and tested one by one. They have also thought a lot in other papers about how to build the digital contact lens. You have to make other parts of the design process before you get this far. Divergence and transformation need to be explored widely first and you must have thought critically and creative about how to build the prototype. This article is straight forward on designing the exact parts for this prototype and how to fabricate the parts; it is not a creative part.

“A single-pixel wireless contact lens display” is the first time someone ever have produced any kind of working digital contact lens. Therefore the place for creative thinking is very limiting I think. The room for creative thinking in the design process starts first when there is a working product I think.

The article “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” is of a slightly different kind. Here they evaluate vibrotactile techniques and video analysis and they then build and experimental mockup which they make the testing and usability tests on. This research is more of a evaluation if the technique is worth working on and then a mockup is great. The article about digital contact lenses is more of a test whether you can create this technique at all or not. This is how you need to work on totally new techniques, but vibrotactile programming can be made in mobile telephones, we know that, and therefore you can look at the reaction from focus groups already before the final technique is even near to be finished.

This type of concept prototype is therefore very useful in the programming and HCI part of media technology where we know what technology you can implement for example to a mobile phone. Then it is not necessarily or even smart to create working prototypes of something that you are not going to use later on. Then it is better to do a mockup and if the focus groups are happy with it then you can go on to the actual real tests.

Theme 4 reflection

So, qualitative methods, what is it? Our collaborate info about qualitative methods now says “ “Qualitative Research Methods: A Data Collector’s Field Guide”, a qualitative research is especially effective in obtaining culturally specific information about the values, opinions, behaviors, and social contexts of particular populations. “. But in this view about qualitative methods I believe that we have gone a step towards pure social science research in some way where it is all about human behavior. Maybe that is what media technology is about? I think that we in this part of the course about the methods should discuss even more what kind of research that is special about media technology. It is a broad area, yes, but it still is an area.

We discussed a lot in our group about how to evaluate the data you get from a qualitative research. You have to be careful and look at your own views a lot when analyzing this data because the results can easily be affected by you as a researcher. I have read about a view called constructionism and this is about that there is no objective reality, especially not in the social world. This is about that people construct their reality based on their beliefs and expectations. This is a thought as hard as the discussion about knowledge in the beginning of the course. I still think it is very important to have these thoughts in the back of your head when talking about qualitative research. How can you be neutral when the research is about human behavior? We also discussed phenomenologism and this view is about that a person’s perception is what creates the persons reality. And people don’t perceive things in the same way. Therefore people’s reality is different and this is what is studied.

Qualitative research is though important and interesting but my point is that it should be made with caution and a open mind. Otherwise is can easily go wrong.

Theme 4

My article this week is “Qualitative evaluation of automatic assignment of keywords to images” by Chih-Fong Tsai , Ken McGarry and  John Tait is once again a image & video inspired article, but not as technical as the ones I usually choose. It comes from the journal “INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT” which just has an impact factor of 1,119 which is the lowest IF I have had so far. This article is about how humans assign keywords to images in a different way than computers. This includes a qualitative method where five people assign keywords to images and then this is compared to what the computers have annotated to this image. This is a part of the research field IR, information retrieval which is becoming a bigger and bigger research-field today.

I think this is an important research because it shows that in this case the computers may today have a problem with being better that the computers. To make a qualitative research on this is good because it can show more and deeper information than if it would have been a quantitative research. It is the process that is important and it is a flexible research. The problem with this research and qualitative research in the whole may be that it is a very small sample of 5 people. They may show some important things, but it is still few people. It may be subjective as well. It is hard to say whether there are other things left out in this research since they use some models that is limiting. The evaluations model which they base their qualitative method on is called Type I and Type II evaluation models and this is models for evaluations and data collections from human judgments. I think this is great models for evaluating human judgments where it works as guidelines for how to analyze behavior. The models are open and this can be a benefit where it is used in a way which fits right in a research but I also think there are big risks with these kinds of frameworks with smaller space for innovation.

The article  “Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses” by Fernaeus, Y. & Jacobsson, M. (2009) is a interesting article in a pretty special subject I think. I like the approach of learning things from two totally different areas like sign systems from comics and from how people are clothing their robots, like Roomba and Pleo. To link these parts to physical programming looks for me as a nice way to invent new ways to solve the old problems. This is a beautiful way to be innovative. In this example when they use clothing to control different kinds of robot they have found a innovative way to solve a known problem. I am interested in this kind of findings and how you can come up with them. I think this is the beauty of qualitative methods where you can explore things in a deeper way. Quantitative methods are still more of repetitive and only confirming way to work where qualitative methods are the innovative way.

My question is if these finding and this progress they did in actDresses could have been done through a quantitative method or if this type of innovative new finding are exclusive for qualitative methods?

Reflection Theme 3

This week has been interesting. Quantitative methods are interesting and as a student you have to be able to master it. I think the hard and interesting thing about it is to find the correct sample size for your cause.  In the article about Mixed Research they use one source for all their information about sample size, namely Onwuegbuzie, A. J., & Leech, N. L. From these authors they have seven different books and articles about sample sizes and other info about how to research with qualitative, quantitative as well as mixed research methods. This is very good to know when it’s time for me to look at my methods in my master thesis this spring.

For quantitative research it is very important to know how you should make your polls, and even more important to be able to know how to use this data. Already after trying SPSS in the lab this week I’m sold. It’s the perfect way to present your data in an easy as well as complex way. To run frequencies in a easy and effective way is perfect. I think it is pretty hard to do this in excel but the cross-tabulate function in SPSS is easy. In the lab me and Jacob compared the two questions “Did you listen to radio yesterday(and for how long)” and “Did you read any special journal yesterday(and how many?)”. It isn’t perhaps the two most obvious questions to compare, but the point is that in just a minute we compared the answers of these two questions and got a nice diagram over the whole thing. I felt like Hans Rosling for a few seconds and I am sure that I’m going to use this tool in my master thesis.

Data mining and presentation is of course one thing, but the important thing is what conclusions you draw from it and where you go next. I think that I have learnt that after the nice presentation of my data I almost have a responsibility to make something out of it at make sure that the correct conclusions is made.

Theme 3

Mixed research and online learning. What’s the connection? When I read the article by Lowenthal, P. R. & Leech, N I don’t feel like they have connected the two subjects enough. It is interesting reading about what mixed research is and the good and the bad things about it, but I don’t feel like they say why it is needed especially in online learning. The only thing they say is that today it is a mono-method, and they want mixed research. It is though really interesting to read this article, because I think it shows pretty good how the world of research works. This is a way for them to enter their say into the debate about how to make the research about online learning better and trying to perform a paradigm-shift in the way research should be made. It is also a way for them do talk about the paradigm wars and propose a way to make peace in that war.

Mixed research is a very interesting way of research and personally I think it is a very good way. I think if it is used right it will be a good way to broaden your research and a good way to make sure that you cover your area of research even better.  There are though some obvious problems. Quantitative and qualitative research is like two different genres, and to combine them you’ll have to be able to use both. It is like the sport Nordic Combined when the athletes compete in both ski jumping and cross-country skiing in the same competition. It is not enough if you are the best in one of the sports, you have to be able to do well in both.

One interesting problem with mixed research is how you describe your methods use. Lowenthal, P. R. & Leech, N talks about this problem and how it may be hard to duplicate a mixed research work. But if you can use this method, it is good. But you get the hard part of both the quantitative method and the qualitative, so you must be careful when you choose.

“Emotions, then, are a double-edged sword that may help or hinder learning” is a great quote from the other article by Cleveland-Innes, M. & Campbell P that shows the essence of what this, according to me, quantitative research on online learning looks at. Would this research be better if it had used mixed research methods then? I actually don’t think so, because this article was successful showing that emotions is present in online learning and that it can be positive or negative. That short statement is the answer to a good quantitative question. A mixed research would have been bigger and more complex. Maybe it would have given more answers to question about how to use this knowledge that emotions exists, but now they propose this on future work.

What I have learned here is that mixed research can be used, but one should be very careful when using it, since there is a possibility that the research will be incomplete instead of better. It is easy to lose vital parts instead of finding new extra possibilities. And for us students, it can be interesting to use the mix, but we need to be good at both qualitative and quantitative research first, and then we can start to use sciences answer to Nordic combination. 

Theme 2 - Reflection

What is theory then? This week hasn't made it any clearer to me. The more I have thought about the more problems I have explored. It is something very complex and we discussed in our group if a theory is something that is true for you, at this very moment. That way we of course got to the problem about what is true and what is not, but apart from that it is a interesting way to look at theory, if you can back it up it can be true for you. We also discussed what’s needed to create a theory. Can you create your own personal theory that applies for example whether you will be hungry at some moment or not. And how is there any special context that is needed for a theory? Or can you create a general theory. As you can see I think the subject this week just created more questions and I got somehow even more puzzled.

But even thought I can’t put words on what a theory is, I still think I know what it is. And how is that? It is because of all the theories we have looked at. Theories about game-theory and signal theory and so on. And that is the most important. To see what these theories does for their subject. They are some kind of thinking-help. A general way to think about the subject. It is not a model, and not data, but some kind of guidelines for thinking.

The point with all of this is that a theory is the best way to explain a way of thinking and according to Wikipedia the word comes from the ancient Greeks and the technical meaning of it was a “contemplative or speculative understandings of natural things” which also shows that it is a way of thinking and understanding things and the word was used by the ancient philosophers.