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.