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.