Theme 5: Design Research

This week we’re discussing design oriented research, i.e. research that proposes solutions in the form of designed systems and products. There were two articles provided for this theme, and the first one was Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses, which is written by Ylva Fernaeus and Mattias Jacobsson. This article propose a “[…] design of physical languages for controlling and programming robotic consumer products”, and it does this by exploring some basic semiotic theories that exist in comics and the world of fashion. The design is presented in the form of three examples; one where the robotic dinosaur Pleo acts differently by wearing different clothes; one example where the smaller GlowBots are provided with pins that define their movement and behavior; and one last example where an automated vacuum is provided with comic book-styled stickers that affects its behavior. The article does suggest technology that can be used to implement this, e.g. RFID in the items that tells the product which programming code to use, but the study does not put this into action itself.

Personally I was a bit disappointed that the study didn’t include actual implementation of the technology to make working prototypes, but I still think it’s quite an interesting and creative subject. If robots are becoming more and more common in our everyday life, perhaps it would be interesting to be able to interact with the robots in a less “controlling” way. When a robotic device lacks the normal forms of interaction, like screens or buttons, perhaps this kind of interaction can provide an effective way personalize the robots. I wonder though, in the time since this article was written, have there been any attempts to really implement this? And, since I figure this concept might entail things like additional work, more programming and processing power, larger expenses and so on, would this then really be a feasible concept for the more practical robots like the vacuum?

The other article to read was Turn Your Mobile into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration, written by Shafiq ur Réhman, Jiong Sun, Li Liu, and Haibo Li. While the last article was more of a suggestion and research for further research and implementation, this article takes a more hands-on approach and develops a product that is then tested and evaluated. The article is, as the title suggest, and attempt to render a live football game on your mobile phone using vibration. The main idea is the make the phone vibrate in different ways and in sync with important events that happen to the ball in the actual football field.

We were asked to reflect on a couple of questions after reading is article and I chose the following:

• What role will prototypes play in research?

Prototypes can play quite an important role in research, but it depends highly on the sort of research that is conducted. In the article Turn Your Mobile into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration they made a prototype with the needed features to be able to test the concept and without said prototype the study would’ve been quite hard to perform and evaluate. In general a prototype is an early stage of a product or a system and can be used to test new designs and hypotheses. It is also generally very interesting to create a prototype when one is conducting design oriented research.

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

In the early stages of a study it can be really useful to develop a proof-of-concept prototype, before you continue making the prototype on which the theory will be based. The proof-of-concept provides a way to test different features, before actual implementation, remove the features that doesn’t work and where new designs and/or development might be needed. It can reduce the cost and the time needed for the study and with an improved functional prototype it can improve the general results in the end.