MY BLOG COMMENTS

Here are all the comments that I have posted on the other students’ blogs during the course:

(I am so sorry for the late posting, I had mixed up the deadline)

Ingrid Larssons blog post “Theme 1: Post-reflections” posted 13 november

(http://ingriddm2572.blogspot.se/2013/11/theme-1-post-reflections.html#comment-form)

I agree with you on that the text contains topics that are important to question and to not take for granted, because it is easy to forget reflecting over this topics in our program at KTH. So far we have mostly learned hard topics like math and physics and what I have learnt from that is there is only one right answer to everything, but I know that in the “real world” outside KTH there is no right simple answer: Therefore it was good for us to read this text to be reminded of reality, and also to start to reflect more.

Martin Johanssons blog post “Theme 3: Research and theory - Reflection” posted 28 november (http://dm2572-martin.blogspot.se/2013/11/theme-3-research-and-theory-reflection.html#comment-form

I agree with you on that we need to work more on our "paper-finding-skills". Before this course I did not barely know what a journal was, even less how to find them. But I guess both you and I now have developed our skills.

It was interesting to read about your experiences from the second seminar, because I unfortunately missed it. Interesting thoughts about generalizing theories and on what kind it is applicable.

Johan Storvalls blog post  “Theme 5 - Design research” posted 6 december

(http://dm2572theroyandmethod.blogspot.se/2013/12/theme-5-design-research.html)

Hi Johan!
I was also disappointed when I read the paper about robots and realized that they did not have an prototype of it. I am also curious of if they have implemented this,i t would have been interesting to read the outcome of that. Otherwise it is maybe an idea for your upcoming master thesis?

Oscar Fribergs blog post “Theme 5: Design Research – Reflection” posted 12 december

(http://ofri-teoriochmetod.blogspot.se/2013/12/theme-5-design-research-reflection.html)

Thank you for your detailed description of this week's lectures. They were, as I had guessed, very interesting. Haibo's lecture seems to have been something really special, especially about the "90-10% theories". I have never reflected over that in relation to problem solving but it is an valuable insight, that could, as Matteo says, be useful in our everyday life as well. I am, as you are, a bit too comfortable when facing problems that I have not seen before. But to be able to grow you have challenge yourself all the time.

Amanda Glass’ blog post “Theme 6: Reflection” posted 19 december

(http://dm2572-glass.blogspot.se/2013/12/theme-6-reflection.html)

I think you have interesting thoughts on qualitative methods that I share with you in someways. I like quantitative methods better because of the large data it can genereate, which could make it more generelixbar, which makes it feel like you actually have come to something and can make a conclusion. But

THEME 6 - Afterreflection

I am starting to feel a little repetitive now since I missed this week’s seminars also. Once again a think that it was a shame, but I could not do anything about it. It would have been interesting to hear a bit more about case studies because I am not so familiar with that. I have tried to read some more about it on Internet to try to get a grip of the topic and it seems interesting. I had some problems reading

I thought it was interesting to read a paper that had used a qualitative method since I have some own experiences from it. I also now know how time-consuming it can be in the end, with all the planning, recruiting, interviewing and transcribing. More than you probably would have thought it would take from the beginning.

THEME 6 - Prereflection

(I am writing this post almost a week late, because I have been really sick in both tonsillitis (halsfluss) and otitis (öroninflammation) so I have not been able to write or even think due to the pain. But no I am eating penicillin and am getting better everyday! Now back to school and life!)

The theme of the week was Qualitative and case study research. To prepare for that I have read 2 papers that I have chosen becaused they seemed relevant and I have also read an article about building theories from case study research.

The first paper I chose to read was “Mobile Geotagging: Reexamining Our Interactions with Urban Space” by Lee Humphreys and Tony Liao. It was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in April 2011.

The researchers examine Socialight and how it could be used in everyday life. Socialight is a mobile geotagging service was one of the first commercially available services for this kind of location-based messages. It lets users leave “sticky notes” with messages to themselves or others tagged with a specific geographical place, so when they pass the place they get a notification of the sticky note in their mobile phone.

The research was done by in-depth interviews with 10 active Socialight users and also by participant observations. Both authors joined Socialight as members and used the service. The in-depth interviews were face-to-face if possible and otherwise they were conducted over the phone. They lasted for about 30-60 minutes and they authors asked the participants questions about their use of Socialight, how, why and when they uses it. The authors contacted active Socialight users to find appropriate participants for them to interview. They contacted 85 users in Socialight who met the criteria for posting information the researchers had set up and got 16 answers, which resulted in 10 participants that got interviewed.

I think that their choice of method was appropriate and relevant based on what they wanted to examine. One negative thing is, as the authors also pointed out, was that it was going on for such a long time (2 years) so the nature of Socialight changed during this period. At first the service was designed for private use only but was developed to a social media platform for developers to create their own location-based services.

Since I also experiences from doing in-depth interviews, my partner and me conducted 6 interviews of this type as a part of our research in our bachelor thesis this spring, I am familiar with this method.  One of the benefits with this type of research method is that it is adaptable due to the situation and time, which probably was good in this case since the service Socialight was changing during the period for research.

A limitation is that due to the small number of participants the results cannot be generalized. It was also a shame that only two out of ten participants were women. I question if the balance really reflects upon the reality among the Socialight users, since it is not a technical advanced system, at least it was not from the beginning.

I have also read a paper that uses a case study as a research method. A case study is a research method focusing on understanding the dynamics present within single settings. It is an in-depth study of a single case or multiple cases, such as person, group or event.

The paper I have read is “Cross-Pollination of Information in Online Social Media: A Case Study on Popular Social Networks” by Paridhi Jain, Tiago Rodriguesy, Gabriel Magnoy, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and Virg´ılio Almeiday. They have examined how information (video, photo and location) from three online social media is shared and used on Twitter.

I have tried to analyse this case study with help of the figure in the text “Building Theories from Case Study Research”. The examined area are very specified and concrete, also new and there is no previous research in this area of cross-pollination. They have used a Twitter Streaming Application program interface to collect the tweets, which was developed by a Brazilian Research Institute. Then the tweets was filtered and sorted. Their data collection was focusing on FIFA Word Cup in 2010, by using related keyword.  Moving forward the collected data was turned in to data sets and analysed with different tools and visualised. The results were interesting, but as the authors reflect upon there are some limitations due to the few keywords that the tweets were filtered by and therefore are generalizations and hypothesis hard to formulate.

I think that the case study is well performed and relevant. But since I not have much knowledge about case studies in general, a part from what I just read, it is difficult to analyse it.

References

“Mobile Geotagging: Reexamining Our Interactions with Urban Space”. Lee Humphreys, Tony Liao. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. April 2011.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2011.01548.x/full

“Building Theories from Case Study Research”. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532-550.

http://www.jstor.org.focus.lib.kth.se/stable/258557

“Cross-Pollination of Information in Online Social Media: A Case Study on Popular Social Networks”. Paridhi Jain, Tiago Rodriguesy, Gabriel Magnoy, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Virg´ılio Almeiday. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. 2011.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6113151&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6113151

THEME 5 - Afterreflection

(I am writing this post almost a week late, because I have been really sick in both tonsillitis (halsfluss) and otitis (öroninflammation) so I have not been able to write or even think due to the pain. But no I am eating penicillin and am getting better everyday! Now back to school and life!)

So, Theme 5 was Design Research and I read two really interesting papers, which I have reflected up on in my previous blog post. Unfortunately I missed the lectures this week, due to my illness. That is a shame because it would have been interesting to here more from the authors of the papers that we had read, since I found this theme one of the most interesting in the course so far. Design research is a pretty new topic for me, I have never before reflected over the methods that can be used. I understand that it is a pretty wide and important subject, because design is very important for example engineers as us and by having knowledge of different methods of design could facilitate our work.

My lessons from this week’s theme are therefore a bit limited. I wish I had time to catch up by reading some more texts on the subjects. But what I have done is that I have read some of the other students’ blog posts about their reflections about the theme, both after and before. By doing that I have gotten a picture of what the lectures by Ylva and Haibo was about.

THEME 5 - Prereflection

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. 

The paper was very interesting to read, since it differ a lot from the papers I have read the last weeks. There was no advanced study conducted, “only” some ideas and concepts on how to design for the physical languages to control robotics consumer products. A new concept, actDresses was introduced and defined and concretized by three cases where it could be used. My case favourite was the first with the Pleo robot, which was about changing its costume depending on which mode you wanted it to be in. The robot, which was a baby dinosaur, was also very cute and I am sure that I would have loved to have something similar when I was young.

The introduced concept was inspired by sign systems that are used in comics and by clothing and accessorising. I see the connection between them and the actDresses but in someway it felt a bit farfetched and not entirely fully motivated. It almost felt that they had this section only to have some theory to base it on, but in the end it gave a good knowledge of the importance of signs and a bit of semiotic theory.

Furthermore I really enjoyed the structure of the paper, because it made it easy to understand and follow. But I had some problems, especially in the beginning, with understanding the terms and robot names that were mentioned and namedropped, but not introduced and declared.

By reading the text I got an insight how new design concepts can be developed and introduced. The process is very different from anything I have read before. I think this process is applicable on different types of designing, and not only for programming and controlling robots.

QUESTION: In this paper they got inspired by comics signs and clothing, which other topics could be good inspiration when doing design research?

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.

What role will prototypes play in research?

I think that prototypes are very important when doing research, because they are very useful when it comes to testing and evaluating new design and ideas. Therefore I thought it was a shame that the first paper I read, about the robots, did not have any prototypes because it would have been interesting to se how that should have worked. Ideas can seem perfectly good on paper but when turning the idea to reality it may not always work as planned. In the other paper, about the live football game, they used prototypes in a very good way, in my opinion. I am not very used to doing prototypes or familiar to the process but if I had to do it I would try do it in a similar way as they did.

What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

One of the characteristics with prototypes is that, as I mentioned earlier, that they play an important role in the design process. By designing a prototype in an early stage in the design process you can detect and avoid problems. The sooner problems are detected in the process, the less are the costs to fix them.

A limitation with prototypes are that they can be unexpected expensive and require too much effort to develop. In some cases you may only test a part of the system in the prototype, without the full functionality, due to the costs, and the risk of doing that is that the results from the prototypes evaluation are not applicable or relevant for the new system as a whole. Prototypes can also reveal new views or scopes of the system that can be useful in the process. 

THEME 4 - Afterreflection

The theme of the week was, as you know, quantitative methods. After posting my blog I begun to skim through some of the other students’ blog posts and I realized that I had misunderstood the assignment in some ways. I answered the two last questions in the assignment in relation to the paper that everyone was supposed to read by Olle Bälter. I have now realised that it was not the way it was supposed to be done, but I hope that my answers were relevant anyway.

This week I attended both the seminar and the lecture. The seminar was interesting even though I am unsatisfied with my performance. I had problems remembering what the papers I had read were about even though I tried to skim through them to fresh up my memory. I guess I have to blame the weekends appearance in between my readings and seminar. In the seminar we were supposed to present the paper that we had read this week to each other in small groups. In my group we were only three people and everyone had read the same paper so there was not that much to discuss and compare different methods, which was a shame. Then we were supposed to draw a figure of the method that was used in the paper and that was supposed to illustrate what had been done in the study. I had a bit problem to understand this task, also the other in my group had, even though we got to see figures that other students had made. That, in combination with my bad memory and time pressure in the seminar, made our presentation of what we had done terrible. None of us felt comfortable speaking English and I learnt that I have to prepare a bit extra before next seminar to avoid a similar situation. That could be done by refreshing my memory by skimming through my blog post and the texts that I have read before attending the seminar.

Olle Bälter held the lecture of the week and it was really enjoyable. It not often I laugh that much in the lectures and am a part of such interesting discussion. I loved the structure of the lecture and by making it to a competition the discussions got extra interesting and everyone was active. We mostly discussed advantages and disadvantages with different types of methods, such as paper questionnaire versus online questionnaire or qualitative methods versus quantitative. Also he gave use concrete examples on what is important to think of when formulating questionaries’ for surveys. For instance always have an odd number of answer choices, avoid negotiations in questions and always test it before sending it out, especially if it is computer based.

I have learnt a lot from this theme. It feels like I have achieved more knowledge in the different types of methods that exists and how they can applied and in particular the quantitative methods. Also I have learnt more about the differences, advantages and disadvantages regarding qualitative versus quantitative methods. Furthermore I now know what to consider when designing questionnaires. This knowledge will be useful in my future studies, especially in the upcoming master thesis, because it is important to use the most appropriate method to achieve best results.