Week #5 - Design research (pre-reflection)

For this weeks theme, we've read the two texts "Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses" by Ferneus, Y., and Jacobsson, M, and "Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration." by Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. They both tackled two different aspects of Design research - the first one has more of a multidisciplinary character; focusing on the 'soft' aspects of HCI - mainly semiotics - while the latter text was of a more technical nature. One thing they both had in common is that both researches included producing and evaluating a prototype. The concept of actDresses in the paper by Ferneus and Jacobsson [1] included three prototypes for interacting with three different kinds of robots in a physical manner, while the latter evaluated if a vibrotactile system could be a viable method for watching football games. [2]
I found both of these texts interesting to read, although more prerequisite knowledge regarding for example semiotics wouldn't have hurted in the text by Ferneus and Jacobsson - it took me a while to grasp their concept and the results. Reading the paragraph "Earlier studies points out that even technomorphic looking robotic appliances can engage users ‘socially’. In the case of Roomba, as with Pleo, specially designed cloth covers are available for purchase on the web. The main usage of such clothes may on the other hand not primarily be for functional purposes, but for personalisation and decoration." made me recall a scene out of the TV show "Parks and Recreation" where Aziz Ansari's character Tom Haverford has personalized his Roomba - strapping an iPod to it, naming it DJ Roomba - making it less robot-like, causing people to think it has a personality of its own. "DJ Roomba" is a reoccusing "character", and has a Facebook page with over 6000 likes [3]. The scene can be found at the bottom of this page.

The role and necessity of prototypes in Media Technology research is hard to dispute. Being that Media Technology almost always in some way relies on technology, rather than other fields of study where "physical objects/technology" aren't as apparent (eg. linguistic, anthropological, and other social studies), constructing prototypes is often crucial to making your research even possible. In the case of the vibrotactical football game, I can't begin to see how you could have conducted user studies in any way other than having the subjects try out the prototype for the game. Trying to imagine getting decent results from, say, a questionnaire where the subjects answer questions such as "Where would you say the ball is located if your mobile phone vibrated repeatedly with a frequency of 0.05 ms?" falls short instantly.

This dependancy on prototyping does require certain skill sets, and also brings some challenges. For starters, you have the fact that the prototype is never the final product. Also, more often than not, the test subjects are (thankfully) aware of that they in fact are subjects of research, which could effect the results. It's like in quantum physics - you change the outcome by merely observing. 

References:
[1] - Fernaeus, Y. & Jacobsson, M. (2009). Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction. New York: ACM. [2] - Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008). Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 10(6), 1022-1033[3] - DJ Roomba Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/pages/DJ-Roomba/293449892037 (author unknown, not published in a major journal)

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DJ Roomba "tearin' it up" by playing Snoop Dogg ft The Dream - Gangsta Luv.