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.