Theme 5: Design research (After)

This weeks theme made me think a lot more concrete about what to do and think about when you are about to conduct a study. I have been thinking a lot about what I should do for my master thesis and looked upon the articles for this theme with that perspective. The lecture by Haibo Li surprised me a bit by not talking so much about using prototypes as part of research but rather about stepping outside of the box to look at your problem in a new way. It made me more confident in an observation I made about the research by Sellnäs. What if she would have skipped including the haptical interface in her study abou group work? The haptical interfaces have already been studied themselves and putting her research in a future scope where these interfaces might be a lot more complex I think the research might just as well have been conducted with a "real" physical interface. She could have had an actual wooden box with wooden geometrical figures in it and if the blind student needed guiding the sighted student could just grab the actual figure that the blind student is holding on to to lead the way. I am not perfectly sure that this would be a good way to do it but thinking about what Haibo Li said about not making your experiments too complex makes me feel like there is at least something to it.

The idea that Haibo Li talked about, that sometimes you are trying to solve the wrong problem was also something I found interesting. I often feel like I am locked down by my presumptions when thinking about a problem and then after a while, sometimes a long time, I come upon something that changes my  perspective and suddenly the solution just appears. Oftentimes what happens then is that I exclude something from the problem or regard something to be less important. I've learned in a project course a few years back that it is a good approach to "kill your darlings" when coming up with a great solution to a problem. That means that you after you've worked on an idea that you think is great but is not really taking you all the way or progressing to slowly you completely abandon that idea and start again from scratch. I guess that what happens a lot of times when you do that is that you force yourself to look at a problem from a completely different angle and redefine the problem. Maybe trying to come up with different, contradictory, sets of definitions for a problem could be a good approach to more easily find these different solutions to a problem.