Theme 5: Design research

Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming 

I found the text about physical programming languages for controlling robots interesting since I haven’t seen these types of approaches earlier. According to the authors, finding an intuitive and understandable way to communicate with the physical product is needed, something more intuitive than to speak to it through a computer. They gave an example of What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG), which I think originally comes from web design, describing a very intuitive way of programming web sites where you see the objects changing in real time.

By involving this type of interaction approach to robots they want to replace the middleman of a workstation (i.e. computer) and instead give an intuitive way of interacting with the robot by other means. In this study they give examples of shifting the clothes of a robotic pet, and placing different signs on a robotic vacuum cleaner.

I have a vague feeling of discussing semiotics in earlier courses but the thought that the same sign could have different meaning under different circumstances was something new to me. They explain how a sign always consist of a signifier (manifestation of the sign) and a signified (what the sign refers to). So I guess that depending on how the robot, in this case, is being designed, people will perhaps perceive it differently depending on context and cultural preferences. So when doing physical programming I guess you should strive to find a common ground among the users, something that they all perceive in the same way and work from that. They look closer into the field of comics and fashion since fashion will be the first look and many share the visual representation of signs used in comics (speed lines, pain stars). 

I liked the concept they presented but didn’t really see the need for it. Where do you store the signs? What happens if you loose a sign that perhaps turns the robot on/off? Since the text is a couple of years old I thought that maybe they’ve improved the concept so I searched for actDresses on Google and found a more recent study on the same concept but on mobiles instead (Jacobsson et. al. 2012) . I think the need for this, from a users perspective, is higher and thought of using the same sort of technique to tell the phone when to enter “sleep-mode”. Perhaps you could place your phone on a mat when going to sleep and thereby skip the trouble of going through the menus?

Prototypes

As we saw in the paper from Réhman et. al. the need for prototypes in research may benefit the research in many ways. For example the users may get an opportunity to actually test the prototype and come with input on how it could be improved. A proof of concept prototype (POP) usually works as a means to verify a concept or a theory has the potential of being used. For example the mobile prototype we saw in the text helped to confirm the difference in vibration strength, among other things.

There are a lot on different types of prototypes ranging from the POP type described above to Form Study, User Experience, Visual and Functional prototypes (Wikipedia, 2013). But the basics of using prototypes are often the same, get some validation of your idea and often some user input to see whether your idea holds or not. I liked the way design presentations were presented in Fernaues’ et. al. text where they gave three different examples with pictures of how the prototypes looked and in what way the users interacted with them.  

Resources

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. 

Jacobsson, M., Fernaeus, Y., & Nylander, S. (2012, May). Mobile ActDresses: programming mobile devices by accessorizing. In CHI'12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1071-1074). 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.

Wikipedia (2013). Prototype. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype