Theme 5: Design Research

This paper is about designing physical language for robotic consumer products. Authors discussed controlling and programming robotic products by analyzing semiotics of theories fashion and comics. Though they develop actDresses concept as sort of physical markings which can be attached to the digital artefact and indicate actions or behaviors of the artefact. ActDresses were used on three cases which are Case 1: Role assemblage outfits for Pleo, Case 2: A behaviour pin collection for GlowBots,Case 3: Comic Signs for a vacuum robot.

What I learned from this paper is that while developing new concepts analyzing, having a deep understanding and a clarified knowledge on the fundamental theories which are on the same field of study or on different field of studies may provide benefits. Moreover in my opinion, designing, implementing, prototyping, testing with prototypes and gathering feedback are the also most significant parts of development cycle which are very well treated subjects within this paper. Furthermore this was the first time I have ever read and studied a paper about design research and I am really looking forward to following lectures to learn more about the concept.

In my opinion prototypes plays a very significant role in researching. Prototyping enables researches to test, try and sometimes prove their hypothesis, product, structure in early stages and provides them lots of new findings and datas to work on. It is the initial design of the final product and first object to be tested according to hypothesis. By building prototypes researchers can see and identify existing and potential errors, limitations on their design, early in the development cycle. According to the prototype results researchers can continue on development or they can change their design which can be more tolerable to do in early stages of the development. In this paper researchers benefit from prototyping in terms of testing efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. By providing prototypes researchers both tested their product and the user satisfaction which is the other advantage of prototypes. By providing prototypes researchers can test the acceptance level of the product both from potential customers or project sponsors. Users can get better understanding of the system being developed. Prototypes clarifies the idea of the the content, product of phenomena and puts it in physical stage. What happens in researchers studies and labs comes to real world and become tangible with prototyping.

As I mentioned above main characteristics of prototypes are that: firstly they are the primary design of the theory, first tangible, testable object for researchers. They provide specifications for actual working system rather than the theoretical one. It enables researchers or developers to detect errors in early stages and enables them to get feedback from users.

On the other hand using prototypes may increase the complexity of the designed system as they can provide unexpected or totally new findings, as a result scope of the system could enlarge and pass the first expected limits. In some cases developed prototype may not include some important parts of the system to get a fast working sample which could cause serious problems in future. Moreover cost of developing a prototype could be very costly and could require too much effort. Furthermore stereotype could not meet requirements and expected outcomes and may be refused by sponsors, customers or users.

References:

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. 

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.