Theme 5 - Reflection

There have two lectures in this week to talk about how to design research. The first lecture provided by professor Haibo Li on Wednesday, in the lecture professor Haibo Li was mainly talked about the process of problem solving. How to define a problem and how to solve the problem? In order to underline this process, Haibo Li gave an example of “hungry bear” which I think gave a clearly description for that. At first, when two people meet a hungry bear the first things comes up to their mind is run out of the bear as fast as possible, however human can never outran a bear.  So how to survive from a bear? Then the problem now is defined by yourself and all you need to do is just run out of the problem. Sometimes when you confused with the problem you met, just changing the view of the points you treat the problem maybe you will get more useful solutions. Related to this case you realized that, in order to survive, you should not outrun of the bear, you should just outrun the other one. The professor put forward his theory for problem solving process that defining a problem can occupied 90 percent of you time and solving a problem will just spent 10 percent time.

The second important part in this lecture I think is that how to filter ideas. You should know how to select and validate the useful idea from many of them. It not seems like easy cause sometime we are blind, we just want to see what we want, besides the idea maybe not the suitable one for you.  Professor Li mentioned different tools to filter ideas which are real world channel model, tunnel vision and high dimensional space. He also advice us to make a balance consider if the solution address the pain point of the problem or can we use our own existing knowledge and technology to solve it. With my personal opinions, the most important thing is to know who you are and what you can. Filtering ideas based on you own circumstances and effective use of the tools surrounding yourself, and choose the most conducive way to you can directly and faster to reach you goals. To validate a good idea, it would be better to make a proof of concept to check if the solution have feasibility can help to solve problem. When you want to evaluate an idea, the best way is to make a prototype. Thus, your idea could be tested in many times and you could find somewhere new ideas to make progress of you old one.

The second lecture provided by Anders Lundström, which mainly talked about what is prototype and how to use it in design research. I could say that I am not have a good understanding for this lecture, unfortunately there have no seminar in this week, I can not get more details for that, however I still can read others reflection post and to fetch up what I missed in this lecture. As I think, use prototype can help us gain a new knowledge. The purpose of research is finding an answer, solving a problem, testing theory. We design research to shape the prototype by gathering existing empirical data, and the prototype itself doesn’t to be a solution. But it could be continuously updated via gathering data or as a base for other experiments be tested again and again. That are all what I could say in the second lecture, I hope I could get more information from others posts..