Theme 5: Design research

PART1:
How can media technologies be evaluated?

We can evaluate the usability of the media technologies, it can be categories into three sections, effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Users should be able to achieve specific goals in a particular environment. Effectiveness is about whether or not a task could be accomplished with the specified system. Efficiency is how much effort is required in order to accomplish the task. Satisfaction refers to the comfort and acceptability of the system to its users and other people affected by its use.

What role will prototypes play in research?

Prototypes play a very important role in research, it can help exploring and expressing designs for interactive computer artefacts, it can represent different states of an evolving design, and to explore options. It communicating its limited purposes to its various audiences is a critical aspect of its use. Prototypes provide the means for examining design problems and evaluating solutions. Selecting the focus of a prototype is the art of identifying the most important open design questions. If the artefact is to provide new functionality for users—and thus play a new role in their lives—the most important questions may concern exactly what that role should be and what features are needed to support it. In this case, user participant helps increase the quality of the product, since user refers more problem than team's researchers.

Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

Sometimes in some cases, we may use a finished-looking prototype to evaluate, and it is thought near completion.We interpret resolution to mean “amount of detail”, and fidelity to mean “closeness to the eventual design”. It is important to recognise that the degree of visual and

behavioural refinement of a prototype does not necessarily correspond to the solidity of the design, or to a particular stage in the process.

What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

Characteristics:

It can reduce time and costs, it improve the quality of requirements and specifications provided to developers. 

It can improve and increase user involvement, prototyping requires user involvement and allows them to see and interact with a prototype allowing them to provide better and more complete feedback and specifications. Users know the problem domain better than anyone on the development team does.

Limitations:

It’s an insufficient analysis, the focus on a limited prototype can distract developers from properly analysing the complete project.

User confusion of prototype and finished system, users can begin to think that a prototype, intended to be thrown away, is actually a final system that merely needs to be finished or polished.

Developers may misunderstand of user objectives.

Developer attachment to prototype, developers can also become attached to prototypes they have spent a lot of efforts producing; this can lead to problems like attempting to convert a limited prototype into a final system when it does not have an appropriate underlying architecture.

Excessive development time of the prototype. A key property to prototyping is the fact that it is supposed to be done quickly. If the developers lose sight of this fact, they very well may try to develop a prototype that is too complex.

The expense of implementing prototyping, the start-up costs for building a development team focused on prototyping may be high.

How can design research be communicated/presented?

I assume this communicated is means been understood by un-technic users, in this case, maybe the UI design, figures and explanation of the product. Prototypes also can be the presentation way.

PART2:

What is the 'empirical data' in these two papers?

empirical data is usually based on some experience, not the real collective data, but this empirical data can nearly become the real data, not so much difference with experimental data, some can be used in some research. It may use a lot of empirical theories and so on. In philosophy can be contrasted to a priori knowledge, which is to gain a posteriori knowledge.

Can practical design work in itself be considered a 'knowledge contribution'?

In my opinion, it can not really be a knowledge contribution, the practical design work can be a great contribution to gain knowledge, but itself is not actually contribution on knowledge. Because the practical design work can be a priori knowledge, not knowledge gain from the research, so I think it’s not “knowledge contribution”.

Are there any differences in design intentions within a research project, compared to a design in general?

Design intention in a research project is a framework to guide a project. Different methods may use in design a research project. In general design, there are different purposes. Usually, this kind of design is to highlight the main idea or for a good-looking staff.

Is research in tech domains such as these ever replicable? How may we account for aspects such as time/historical setting, skills of the designers, available tools, etc? 

Yes, in some way it is possible to replicable, the prototype design can be replicated. In time/historical setting, It’s better not replicate. But skills of the designers and available tools can be replicated.

Are there any important differences with design-driven research compared to other research practices?

After reading these two articles, I would say the design-driven research is more focus on prototype design, and the process of design. While some other researches are more focus on the experimental part, or the result of the research.