Theme 5

Hi there! Welcome to theme 5 - Design Research!
Some may ask, what is design research, well basically it is research conducted via development of a prototype or a certain technology and the evaluation of this specific thing. I have, in a number of courses, had the chance to develop and evaluate prototypes of varying degrees. My greatest experience of this comes from my bachelor thesis. In my bachelor thesis I and my bachelor-partner developed a vocabulary exercise program which used game theories to motivate the users (who in this case where children around the age of 10) to practice more. You can read more about that in the reflection coming up.

The characteristics of developing a prototype is almost always as following; You dig up the background and development of similar or aligning aspects of the prototype during the years before your own development, you analyze this and start with the different phases of developing the actual prototype and afterwards you do different user tests and evaluate it's performance.

A prototype can be anything ranging from an interface on paper (you draw the actual screen which will be interacted with and various ways to interact with it), an interface where the test participants click on the screen and you show the next interaction step by switching to the following picture or a high functioning prototype where the user interacts on her/his own getting feedback and appropriate malfunction messages when needed, this high functioning prototype often do not have all the functions it should have when being a real program. Limitations of prototypes is that it often has to be revised a number of times, because it often is a compromise of how the finished product actually will work and look like. This may generate a high cost when developing, but if you would ignore developing a prototype and you may get a program who does not work properly or who does not have the appropriate functions. In the worst case you can get a product who works perfectly but who nobody uses because it is not built for the right audience. One other thing is that you often have to produce different levels of functioning prototypes, i.e use iterating development of prototypes, which could take time but will be beneficial in the long run.

In conclusion you do get a lot of perks by using prototyping during a development, you can early on change aspects who does not work so well by just using a basic paper prototype.

The paper I have chosen this time is "Values at Play: Design Tradeoffs in Socially-Oriented Game Design" by M. Flanagan et. al., published 2005. It is about creating a networked game environment which will teach middle-school girls about programming. The study is conducted over three years with multiple people involved. The game play is in my opinion questionable about only attracting girls, but nevertheless it takes place in a world between two rivaling groups, who battles through dance routines. By using simple code to create the various routines the target group will learn about programming in the same time as seeing a cool result. Methods used in this paper is mainly design research methods (prototype) and literary research to develop this prototype in question. They used "throw-away" prototypes in which they developed a scenario in the game to test and in an iterative process build a high function prototype or product. To evaluate this they used user-tests. The iterative process is described quite good but the actual feedback is hard to find other than by reading between the lines of the iterative process. It is rather a question concerning the report but it is something that I think will be beneficial for researchers to think about, if you do not write out the feedback from the test participants in the report or paper, then you should submit it as a supplement.