I have mixed opinions regarding the Haibo Li’s lecture and paper. The paper about turning your mobile into the ball with vibration, I found to be a great source of inspiration and knowledge. It clearly defined what it wanted to accomplish and the journey it took giving me an interesting read.
The subject in the lecture was about the whole process of finding an idea and taking the necessary steps to reach a prototype and beyond. A lot of focus was put on the idea, and generating it. Solving a problem is good but being able to redefine the problem is great, different perspectives help immensely according to Haibo. He had a theory that we should spend 90% on defining the problems and 10% on solving them. Because we as students are often given the problem already predefined we learn that we should put the focus on solving, even though working in real life might never be that simple.
To me, this lecture felt like we were only barely scratching the surface, of design process/research. I know we are only supposed to gain an introduction, creating a thirst for more, but this was way too shallow. It felt like the basics we already knew - focusing on the monetary value of ideas. His concept that a great idea is only great if it is able to earn billions of dollars felt wrong to me. He might have meant that it should cause a breakthrough in society, but his way of telling us wasn’t clear in that aspect.
What I could take away from this though, would probably be the importance of preparation and the initial process of working with design research.
Anders Lundström
From this lecture, I learned proof of concept and using the prototype for presentations was mostly done in industrial design, not research. When creating a prototype in design research, it does not have to create favourable results or solve a problem. Merely the act creating something that can provoke a situation could create a path towards new knowledge - and research is all about gaining knowledge! Furthermore I now understand that in design research the final experiments are not the only answer when coming to conclusions but instead it is the whole process, iterating over many steps.
It seems that design research is a quite new field of research, with no set standards or rules. This implies that there are numerous ways of conducting this research which I find thoroughly fascinating.
Towards the end of the lecture, design as general term came up. It proved to be quite the pickle to define it in a clearcut way but the general consensus that Anders came up with was: Design is about reconfiguring/rearranging things to move from an unwanted reality towards a wanted one. He also mentioned that design can be used as a tool to discover “the real problems”, which ties into what Haibo Li said about the importance defining/redefining things to maybe get a clearer picture.
Hej,
SvaraRaderaLike most of us you highlighted the 90%/10% concept of focusing on formulating the research question. Your reflection, however, is the first one I have read that considers a student's viewpoint in this scenario. It is true that we often get the research question and just have to focus on the solution. Yet, Haibo Li also had the teacher/student example in the bear scenario, and a learning we should take away from that is maybe that we as students should take more responsibility and question given research problems. That could be good training for projects in which we have to formulate the research question ourselves anyways!
I also have mixed feeling about the first lecture. It was better organized than the second lecture, and the way that he represented the theme was entertaining. However, I didn’t like that the value of an idea depends on the money that can earn. The most important part of the lecture was the redefinition of the problem-research question. We have to keep in mind that the problem is defined by someone else, so we need to redefine it I order to get a better understanding and come up with a solution. I had never thought about that a solution of a problem is based on 90% of the definition of the problem and 10% at the actually solution.
SvaraRaderaHello Marcus!
SvaraRaderaI agree that Haibo's lecture was a bit shallow without much detail information. While success in the shape of financial success can in some way dictate if an idea is good or not, it shouldn't be the only factor in play. Success can be measured in many ways. Today many of our biggest companies in ICT are still not making a single dollar in profit (Spotify for example). Are they not successful?
I think it is really intresting that you in both lectures ends with almost the same thing "defining/finding the problem". However in Haibos lecture it was more in the shape of defining before prototyping and in Anders case prototyping can be used as a tool to see the real problems. I think both are important because before we start prototyping we have to conduct some research about how we should do the prototype. However we also need to evaluate the prototype and be open for configurations of it (iterrative process). As a conclusion I think it is important to define the problem properly however we can see the design process and conducyed test of the prototype/s as a part of this. The prototype/s don't need to be the final solution, instead it can serve us with valuable knowledge about what is needed and whar can be done.
SvaraRaderaHi, very interesting post. The post full of you personal opinions which is very different than other posts i read. I could say that is what i want to read after the course. Your idea of both lectures are cleary and easily to follow and i could not agree more. Thank you so much for your post.
SvaraRadera