Theme 5: Design research

The paper Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration examines the usability of the rendering of a football game by using vibrotactile signals. Besides the developement of a prototype they evaluated the usability of their system.
Their research paper can be seen as a representative example for the area of media technology. Due to the main purpose of media technology to bring human beings and computers together most newly developed technologies have to be tested in user studies. This is the only possibility to test the efficiency of the interaction between both parts. Therefore it is nearly inevitable to create a prototype to demonstrate and to evaluate the results of the research.
Prototypes in general play an important role in the research in engineering field since the adaption and application of developed technologies have to be tested. The introduced paper about rendering of vibrations would not have been as valuable as it is without a prototype. Even though the theoretical knowledge the prototype is based on has its foundation in approved theories and paradigms about usability and mobile applications, it would not be verifiable without the prototype. And an answer to a question or a solution to a problem is not of great use if it cannot be proven. This is why researchers strive to achieve the proof of concept, a milestone in their development process where they are able to proof that the prototype can be implemented and will satisfy its requirements. Moreover, due to the nature of the study by Réhman et al. the interaction between the human being and the developed system had to be observed in order to value the new technology. As human behaviour cannot be predicted by the use of theories, a study with participants is mandatory for a productive research.
But one has always to keep in mind that prototypes are only a tool to demonstrate the technology not to completely implement it. For example in the referenced study only one mobile phone model and a self-designed vibrotactile circuit board was used to simulate the technology. Therefore the technology has only been tested under laboratory conditions. Nevertheless, it was never the aim to evaluate the technology under all possible real life conditions. But they were able to test it in an environment which would provide significant predications to support the research and provide useful information for further research.
Another part of the research is the presentation of its results. Since the results of a design study can only be measured in abstract terms such as usability, this should happen according to established principles of measuring these terms. Réhman et al. for example measured usability according to ISO recommendations which split usability in the three components effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Every component has been measured in their study and compared to the other ones. They tried to find correlations between and within the components. That way results of design research can be presented.

We had to read two papers which address design research. The empirical data which has been used in the researches to support their findings are the results from observations and interviews. Therefore it is very difficult to reproduce this data and verify the results even though it is possible to come to similar conclusions. This is why I think that practical design work counts as knowledge distribution. But maybe the context of the design research has to be considered even more than in other scientific fields. The reason for this is that design requirements change much faster then paradigms in science. As an example one could compare the general behaviour of teenagers and elderly persons while using mobile phones and tablets. Since the first group grew up using these devices as a part of their daily life they interact more natural and easier with them. This creates new possibilities of design and with it new requirements. Even if this is an example for design in general and not specifically for design intentions within a research project, it applies for the latter as well. Furthermore, I believe that both research fields are very similar since both aim for usability and practicability. But the focus of design for a research project might lie more on the practicability.
Another important aspect that should be considered are the available tools. Technology is one of the fastest developing scientific fields. And since every year there are not only new devices like the to design for but also more tools to design with, design guidelines change very quickly. Due to this design studies has to be updated regularly. Sometimes devices like the Microsoft Hololens [Grubert, J., Kranz, M., & Quigley, A. J. (2015, August). Design and technology challenges for body proximate display ecosystems. In Adjunct Proceedings of MobileHCI 2015 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. ACM Press-Association for Computing Machinery.] might even change our way of interacting with technical devices will change completely and as a result a lot of previous design research will become irrelevant.