Fifth theme...

This week’s theme is the “Design Research”. As Professor Panthea Lee stated in one of her articles (February 19, 2012), design research is a research that deals with very specific topics. It is a radical element in meeting people’s actual needs about services, products and systems/programs. In a design research, the data collected can be considered as narrative. This is because in order to understand and cover human’s needs, the researchers in the design area will gather the data through people’s words, photos, gestures, drawings and in some cases stories.

One of this week’s tasks was to read the article “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” by Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008). In this research the authors present a method of rendering live football game information using the already existing vibrator in mobile phones. Their main idea was that different vibration signals corresponding to the ball’s states and positions can provide the user with a spherical picture of where the ball is during a football game. After a certain survey was conducted, they decided that for getting the best results in rendering a game, they should use five vibrotactile signals. Their next step was to perform a number of experiments in order to get to their conclusions. In the end of their research, the authors concluded that: 

• Vibrotactile rendering of live information through mobile phones is highly a desirable process but also a very challenging one.
• The design of vibrotactile signals can be a very tricky procedure, so someone has to be very careful while designing their coding scheme.
• The training process needs to be very carefully designed.
• Rendering a wider range of information by vibration on mobile phones is quite a new topic for both researchers and mobile users.
• Both visual and audio displays are necessary for better interaction with users.

In every design research, like the one above, prototypes have a very important role. But what is exactly a prototype? After some research in the net I find the following definition that I personally like: “A prototype is an early sample or model built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from” [2]. More specifically, in the research above, the prototype was designed to test and trial the new design theory that the authors proposed. Prototyping is more common in researches with a more tangible technical that theoretical background. Furthermore, we should highlight that it could be necessary to develop also a proof of concept prototype so that the researchers can validate that their idea actually works and functions as they have envisioned [3].

For the second part our post, the design research paper that I have chosen is  “Development of advanced rectangular micro speakers used for wide liquid-crystal display mobile phones”, written by Chang-Min Lee1 and Sang-Moon Hwang  and  published in the JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS.

This paper presents a design prototype about improving the performance of the microspeaker that is commercially adopted today, while maintaining its dimensions in the same size. In their research, the authors used the method of comparison as they compared different types of conventional microspeakers. Subsequently, after processing the collected data, they proposed new improved types of microspeakers. For their presentation, the authors adopted a 3D electromagnetic FEA (finite element analysis) and a mathematical approach. Among their conclusions, is that a structural alteration in the center magnet and yoke, can lead to a reduction of the equivalent stiffness and moving mass. So the sound pressure level (SPL) of any frequency range in the new proposed type will be higher than the conventional one.

References:

[1] Lee, Panthea, “Design Research: What is it and Why Do It?”, THEREBOOT.ORG, 2012.

[2] http://gigamaster.blogspot.se/2012/07/wireframe-mockup-prototype.html

[3] http://leardon.com/why-a-proof-of-concept-prototype