Theme 5: Design research (Before)

Relating to the article by Haibo Li et. al

For a lot of the research in media technology I believe that there is an intended recipient, or user. In other fields the technology is not inherently user centered to the extent that is the case for media technologies. So when researching media technologies the best approach is often to retrieve qualitative data from relevant research participants. Usability, attitude, human perception and cognitive abilities are the key concepts of research in media technology I think. So research will have to take these into account to successfully gain new knowledge. A good approach to attaining the data for this kind of research will a lot of times be to present a prototype or concept idea that can be directly evaluated by participants in a study. The research can be designed to test a small part of an upcoming prototype or the whole prototype itself. The idea will however be to identify attitudes and constraints to further base the research on. The data collected when evaluating media technologies will, I think, always be connected to the concepts above mentioned. In a combination of observing, asking questions and collecting usage data from the participants a broad range of qualities can be investigated.

The main advantage of designing a prototype for research is probably that it makes it possible to test for multiple attributes at the same time and also to test in an environment that is similar to that of the intended use. Like for qualitative methods in general a prototype can give unpredicted or unintended information. It is hard to foresee all possible obstacles or constraints in a research so by using a prototype this unintended information may be valuable for adapting the research or for further research. It is a natural part of an iterative process but that might also be seen as a limitation to using prototypes as a method. When starting off a research in this fashion the iterative process must be embraced and every research step must be expected to incrementally work it's way toward the goal. Of course every step will provide valuable information but one cannot be sure that it is generalizable.

Relating to the articles by Eva-Lotta Sallnäs et. al

I found the conclusion that introducing audio to a haptical visual interface improves performance interesting, but not surprising. It seems quite natural that an interface that more closely replicates the "real world" will be easier to grasp. I wonder what kind of performance boost they would get by implementing actual 3d sound. It seem quite possible to do so I think. If the collaborating participants wear headsets they could talk to each other through those will still hearing 3d sound. They could even position the voice of the collaborator in the virtual audio space.

It was also interesting to see that visually impaired and sighted people effectively could collaborate. But it seems that the sighted people had little to gain from this group exercise. So I am wondering, which could be questions for the lecture, to what extent is the haptical interfaces relevant for group work? Are the results to be seen as implications for how to perform group work in general or only in the situation with a haptical interface?

The collaborative experimental setup will make it different from an individual setup in a few ways. First of all there are some technical and measurement constraints to this approach. Communication in the group, especially in this case, is important and thus participants cannot be hindered in their communication by for example headphones. Also they will be positioned at different places in the experiment scene which might affect the results. The gathering of data must take all participants into account and gathering data on the communication between them is essential to explain the result. Also, people may act differently in a group than individually which will have to be accounted for.

By combining qualitative and quantitative methods one will acquire a setup that will be able to show a correlation and provide the information needed to explain that correlation. The quantitative method will act as support when formulating the main theories which in turn are derived from the qualitative data. In the articles by Sallnäs et. al they used timing and event data to show correlations and then explained them using the information they gathered from interviews/comments and the observation of participants. To extend this it will also mean that as the research is conducted the qualitative methods will provide deeper understanding and the possibility of adapting the study, eg. follow up questions, and to identify new factors that are of interest. If the experimental design and the gathering of data is more extensive than to account only for the expected results than the new factors identified will also be able to be supported by quantitative data. So by combining subjective and objective methods a study with greater dynamic is achieved.