Fifth Week, Reflections

Theory

Haibo Li's lecture was based on the engineers point of view, and basically it was about the ways of how the idea is becoming the prototype. He also talked about design technologies and prototype research, and how the most simple solution is usually one the hardest to find. His discussion on the usability analysis helped to understand why this is a good measurement of a prototype. He also mentioned the three parameters of the prototype usability, which we have learned from the paper: effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction.

Pictures and video examples were quite interesting and funny (bear, tunnel vision metaphors, especially Rowan Atkinson part), although I doubt that this information would actually help in the research work. Overall, we have seen the most of that presentation already during previous Haibo Li's lecture in September. 
Nevertheless, one motivation picture was very inspiring: smiling Mark Zuckerberg and the words that the great new projects are not about some new technology, but about the creative ideas, so they can easily be based on something that was invented before you.


Practice

The this week seminar task – to draw the visual structure of our articles based on the research design - was both interesting and challenging. We felt that our papers have the same structure, going from theory and previous background to the hypothesis, prototype creation, its testing and evaluation. Previous groups have downloaded the graphs of this kind already. That is why we decided to go deeper and took two of the most complicated papers from our group findings to work with. 

After our detailed discussion it was great to listen to other sorts of design research, with some variables on the every step of research. It also was very good to have a visual proof, as the graphs we all created were quite different. 
The Beau Armstrong's paper, which we had chance to learn in details due to the great slides, made me think about the actual prototyping work. I wanted to go deeper in this field, and found more literature on this subject. Thus, sometimes theory is much easier to create than to embody it into a real object. Before the tests there is a long work on the prototypes development and improvement. I found this paper quite helpful and advice it to everyone: "What Do Prototypes Prototype?". In Helander, M; Landauer, T; Prabhu, P. Handbook of Human–Computer Interaction.