Theme 6

The first paper I've chosen is Construction of Values in Online and Offline Dating Discourses: Comparing Presentational and Articulated Rhetorics of Relationship Seeking. It is written by Jimmie Manning. The research paper was publiced 9 october 2013 in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communucation which has an impact factor of 1.778.

Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

In this study there were 30 participants in this study were active members of a commercial dating website. The participants did interviews with the researchers about them self and their dating profile. The benefits of using a qualitative study is that its gives the researchers deeper understanding of an issue. It's also a good way to explore a new field in science. But its also time consuming and the results cant really be generalize since there where to few respondents to the survey.

What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?

The researchers did use the first four questions about how the individual was trying to shape and market their identity their dating site. The fifth question worked as a validity check where the researchers asked the individual about the choices they made in writing their advertisements. Together the individual the were asked to guided them through every element on the profile.

Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

They only did one interview with each individual. The results only represent the opinions of the people in the studies at only one given time.  Their priority's and wishes for a partner could maybe change after the first date etc. The sampling was also just done using the snowball method

Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

Its a research strategy where the focus is on analyzing a single case or multiple cases.

The goal with the research is to understanding the dynamics present within a single setting. Both qualitative and quantitative methods could be used when doing a case study.

Paper: The Presence of Hyperlinks on Social Network Sites: A Case Study of Cyworld in Korea from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communucation

Use the "Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research" (Eisenhardt, summarized in Table 1) to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your selected paper.

The goal is to determine to which  extent hyperlinks appear within user-submitted comments on Korean social network service Cyworld. The data was collected from 130 Korean National Assembly Members by using software that did a copy the profiles each day during April 2008 - June 2009. When the data sampling was done they did continue on with the analyzing of data.

It feels like the final conclusions are well connected to the data they found in the research.

Theme 5: Reflection

This week we had two lectures on the topic of design research.
The first one was Ylvas lecture was about her research paper we read last week.

According to Ylva the actDress is a way of physical programming on robots.
However the system is limited to at most change the robots behavior more than adding something new to the product. According to Ylva the main application she could think of today would probably to start with toys.  More interesting was the concept Ylva brought up about was the more industrial aspects of the concept. The industrial company ABB have been looking for was to visualize a industrial robots state in a easy way to humans.

The robots used in the research where at the time (Pleo and Roomba) was very new and exciting. Ylva pointed out that if the research had been done today another technoligy might have been used.

On Haibos lecture he talked about how its important to clearly define the problem that needs to be solved. The greatness of the solution is correlates to how good the problem is defined. This is something that is necessary for an idea to become "great". Haibos lecture was more focused on how ideas could be turned into a commercial product. This was quite the opposite from Ylvas presentation where the commercial application of the idea was more "fuzzy" and not so clear. 

Theme 5

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.

This paper is about how physical languages can be used to controlling and programming robotic consumer products.  By using pieces of clothing and the sign system used in comics to control the behavior of the robots. I like the idea of trying to bring a balance between appearance and action by using clothing. Many devices today do not even have a display or any other visual feedback to the user. Instead you have to rely on some complicated instruction manual. 

By using this physical languages the barriers of technology adoption for children, seniors etc might be lowered. Sometimes people that are not used with technology are afraid to experiment and learn by doing, therefore something like clothing could be a solution to overcoming these barriers.  But to find really good and logical applications for the "actDresses"might take a while. But I still think it has a lot of potential.

Question: Is there any technology today that would benefit from actDresses?

What role will prototypes play in research?

By using prototypes some abstract or complicated ideas can be visualized and evaluated at a early stage. The iteration process becomes much simplified if there is a prototype early in the research. 

What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

Prototypes makes evaluation and feedback becomes easier to come by. Errors can also be detected much earlier. It can also help the group working on the prototype to make sure they are all aiming for the same goal. Limitation is that creating the prototype might take longer than expected.The different iteration of a prototype might only refine the product, and the final product might only be a incrementally better than the first version.

Theme 4:Reflection

This week have been about quantitative and qualitative research. We have been discussing the benefits and limitation of the two research methods.

During the seminar we presented our research papers within a smaller groups and picked one that we wanted to investigate more closely. Some of the papers did not really have any clear result because the target group were too small for the results to be generalized in any way.

We decided to go with a research paper about how people in the insurance industry in Greece uses social media at work. It was interesting analyze the different key factors leading up to the result. Some variables did not affect the results (age was one for example). The researchers came to the conclusion that 2/3 of the people that participated in the study used social media at work and according to the employees it improved the productivity at work. The problem for me with the study is that people might justify their bad behavior by saying its adds value to the company. Its like asking if the coffee machine is adding productivity at the work. I might say it does. But if I spend ten minutes at it every hour it might be the opposite. This is also quite hard to measure.

During this week lecture we not only discussed the two methods but also how to construct a quantitative research. We got divided into small groups and played a game. I really enjoyed the lecture and the discussions