Theme 5: Design research

How can media technologies be evaluated?

This is a tricky question because media technology is a very broad term and it covers a lot of different types of studies. Because of this you can't use one method to evaluate "media technology" and therefore I can't give one good answer to the question. However I do think feedback from end users will help to evaluate in many areas of media technology since it can provide you with valuable data.

What role will prototypes play in research? Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

I think prototypes have a big role in media technology research because many parts of its science field are still new and not yet explored. It is therefore important to test your ideas with prototypes at an early stage of the research since you have nothing to compare with. If this is done right it can provide you with valuable data that could save time, money and a lot of headache.  Also it’s important so you don’t spend a lot of time building on something that nobody wants in the end except yourself.

What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

When talking about prototypes there are two distinct groups of them. On one side there are early stage prototypes and on the other side there are almost finished products. The early stage ones should be cheap, fast to build, and easy just so you are able to test out some specific functionality. The almost finished prototype products could be really advanced prototypes that are used just for fine tuning of an artifact.

After spending more than 3 hours looking for an article and the deadline 3 hours away I will write about a dissertation I found instead of an intended research paper we were supposed to find. I hope this is ok even though it does not qualify as a research paper since it’s not published in a journal.

Design and Evaluation of a Humanoid Robot for Autism Therapy is the title and it’s written by Daniel Ricks at Brigham Young University 2010. I found this paper interesting since it as the article I chose for Theme 4 is studying autism and how you can help kids that are diagnosed with it. The paper focuses the design of a robot called Troy. According to Ricks, recent evidence has shown that children with autism may behave more pro-socially when interacting with a robot than with a human.  The objective of the research was therefore to develop a robotic system for use in the clinical treatment of children with autism. Troy was therefore developed to fulfill such a role in a clinical setting and Rick’s primary objective was to design a robot that would be engaging to the children.

When reading the paper I learned that design research requires a lot of documentation to cover what you are doing since you can’t simply express your results in a simple table or graph. A result of this can be seen in the length of the paper since its 94 pages long. Another thing is that design research often requires a user study to give the design credibility in real life.