Week #5 - Design research (post-reflection)

This week was about Design Research, and the tutoring consisted of two lectures. The first one was with Ylva Fernaeus and revolved around her research concept called actDresses. The lecture started with Ylva presenting her research, giving us a brief understanding of what they did. After having read the paper, this was a bit superfluous - but could be interesting for a student who hasn't read her research. We then got a crash course in the area of semiotics, after which we got into a not-so heated discussion about what qualitative research can be, and specifically in Fernaeus' case, that the design concept itself could be enough empirical data to be accepted and good research. You don't have to have huge user studies, cross-nation surveys with thousands of respondents, brain scan images and tests with tons of multi-axes graphs in different color schemes to be accepted by the research community. I found this interesting, and for me, not being the type of future engineer who will do my research frolicing in optimizing signal theories using experimental math - it bode well. 

Our second lecture was by Haibo Li, and didn't focus at all on the research paper on the vibrotactile football match we've read by him and his colleagues. Instead, Li taught us how to become famous and great researchers. Amongst other things. But more on this later. Basically - Li's lecture was a very hands-on approach on how to conduct good research, and maybe make some money along the way. For this, he stressed "we need the businessman" - a person who can see a good idea but who can answer questions such as "is this breakthrough technology?", "does it address a real pain point?", "is the timing right?", and "can we exploit the opportunity for the long term, or would this market commodotize so quickly that we wouldn't be able to stay profitable?". But before this - we need math, according to Haibo, as a solid foundation on which we can build our research. Also, prototyping helps, if you want to sell your research.

So, how do you become a great researcher? Enter Haibo's theory, which says that researchers who want to become famous spend 90% of their time solving the problem and 10% defining it. If you instead want to be a great researcher, it's the opposite - spend 90% of your time defining your problem, and 10% solving it.