This week we skipped the seminars and instead had two lectures by Ylva Ferneaus and Haibo Li, which papers we've read last week. It was nice with a change in the schedule but I think that if you're going to have a lecture you should stick to that and not try to have too much discussion in the lecture halls (some questions are of course fine but when it's more like a seminar, the setting is all wrong). I feel like lecture halls simply are too big and during the first lecture it was mostly awkward silence since no one wanted to talk.
With that being said, I'm not too sure that I learned anything from the first lecture. Many things were unclear, for example what the purpose of the paper was and what further research had been made since then. But one thing I take with me from this lecture is however that it's possible to do research projects with scenarios and that the concept can be the contribution to the field. We also had a discussion about how statistics could help and as an engineering student I sort of feel like it's a must-have in a research paper but maybe statistics through interviews etc. doesn't always contribute in a good way. It made me think of the quote by Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." So when dealing with concept development, maybe user studies isn't always the way to go (at least not in the first development stages).
During the second lecture Habio Li also talked about design research but more from the technological perspective. The name of the lecture was Design Research: from idea to prototype and I really enjoyed it. He presented a sort of 5-step model from idea to prototype, starting from how to come up with an idea all the way to how you should communicate it to possible investors. You could see that he has a lot of experience from this , giving good examples of the different steps.
The part I liked the most was the beginning when he spoke about how to come up with ideas. The idea that you should re-state the problem felt so obvious when he explained it but was something I haven't thought too much of before. Taking a problem and thinking of different solutions feels like a very important tool for us to have (how many times haven't you heard someone saying that we become problem solvers after 5 years at KTH?). Another good thing was the explanation of how you evaluate a good idea, and the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is something I feel would have been really good to learn before the bachelor thesis (but also good to have heard of before the master thesis).
Endnote: I don't have to be faster than the bear, I only have to be faster than you.
Hej. Regarding the lectures today. I'd just like to say that I'm glad we did have lectures instead of only seminars. I think there was a great need to just listen to somebody for a change. However as you said, the first one was more like a seminar and that felt a bit weird. Even though I think that it became somewhat clear what conceptual research is all about, the discussions weren't great or perhaps not even suitable to have. I love the quote by Ford, it just explains the whole thing about evaluating ideas, or thinking outside the box. It's similar to what Steve Jobs said: "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." Still, "The customer is always right", right?
SvaraRaderaHej Stefan!
SvaraRaderaI find it really interesting that you chose to end with this phrase: "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you"! I believe that going one step behind and looking at the situation from a different perspective enables us to redefine the problem and thus to find the right solution.
I will also keep from Haibo's lecture that we cannot always trust ourselves and the related notion of Tunel Vision-how we cannot see the problem if it is outside our vision.
Interesting opinion that you take up in the first paragraph. I was unfortunately not on Ylvas lecture so i can't say my feeling for how it was. I agree with you though that trying to have discussions on lectures can be very hard because, as you say, the hall is too big and it can be hard to get heard and so on. I took a course on Stockholm School of Economics this spring though and i think that the discussions on the lectures was much better there. So i think it also depends much on us as students to get the discussion going anyway.I think the format that we had last week with Olle Bälter was very good. There it was mostly a seminar but also a kind of lecture since Olle talked a bit as well about quantitative methods. Since we only was half the class (and even less really) we got good discussions.
SvaraRaderaI agree with Andreas about the need for both lectures and seminars. It's interesting to discuss much about the topic of theory and methods but you also want to listen to professors with experience to learn more about it.