Post Theme 5

This week was a bit different from the previous ones when we didn’t had a seminar but instead two lectures. I will discuss these lectures separately. In preparation to this theme I read the assigned texts and during the week I revisited some HCI books and some literature concerning design process.

The first lecture was held by Haibo Li on the Wednesday. He talked about how we can go from idea to a prototype. He started off with how we can come up with an idea and pointed out that many times we tend to spend too little time in defining the real problem/s and instead starts too early to solve a problem. This might be problematic both because we might have missed the real problem but it is also a chance that we miss the best solutions. He talked about spending 90% of the time to define the problem and only 10 % on the solution. I think much of this is true however I thing the 9:1 ratio is a bit extreme. But we need to focus much energy on defining the problem, but it might be hard to do that because we might need to show to our employer results or have shortage of time. 

Some of us have a lot of ideas, which we should consider as a great resource, which we need to filter in some way to choose the best of them. I think there are many ways to do this Haibo pointed that we should do a technical evaluation. And to choose the idea with biggest potential. It is important that it address a real pain problem and appeal the market. However the most important is probably to ask ourselves if we have the skills to develop it to be a great product. I found this part of the lecture really good. However I myself have often come to encounter myself with restricting myself to only work on one idea to solve a problem and then you get attached to it and it is hard to reevaluate the idea later. I think it is important to stay open minded and work with more than one idea in the beginning of a project. What seems to be the best solution in the beginning doesn’t always turn out to be the best in the end when you have gained more knowledge and experience of your idea. In other word we should maybe chose more ideas than one to continue to work with and then decide later.

The second lecture held by Anders Lundström was more about this week’s topic when he was more about what Design Research or RtD (Research through Design) is. He didn’t had the business approach that Haibo presented but rather a more research approach. The thing that was most interesting during the lecture I think was when he talked about how we can use prototypes as tools to provoke the answers to the research question. When we apply this tool it can often be hard to see what the empirical data of the research is. The empirical data could be as an example the whole process or actually only the pre study (as in the two articles that was preparation for this theme). 

Before I have always thought about prototypes as something that tries to solve a problem (business).

Another important insight I got during the lecture was when we discussed that only usage of methods, such as qualitative and quantitative, doesn’t make it contribute with knowledge. Instead it is the analysis of the gathered data. I wasn’t surprised by it but I think we often focus much on the methods and data. When we might invest more time in analyzing the result we get. 

In summary it could be said that design itself is a kind of knowledge. By designing and communicating the findings we can learn a lot. Designing is a much more complex action that it could be seen as from the beginning especially when it involves humans. We need to know a lot of current designs and what the goals humans have. We often need to iterate through the design process many times and for each iteration we will gain some knowledge.