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.
Hej Johannnes!
SvaraRaderaI agree with you that Haibos lecture had a different focus- on how ideas could be turned into commercial product. We did discuss about addressing to a real problem that appeals to a big enough market, about business mind and exploitation of ideas, about timing, tips for innovation, profits, patents and IP rights. So, I wanted to ask your opinion on the commercialization of scientific research. I have read concerns that patenting activity from Universities might harm the open science culture-ideas, theories and findings are articulated freely between the scientific community so that everybody have access to it- which characterized Universities and academia. Do you agree with that?
Hej!
RaderaThanks for the comment.
I think both "open" scientific research and more "commercial" focused research can co-exist.
By working together with the industry, research with commercial potential might have a higher chance to reach a possible market more quickly. This way research can be put to good use faster and add economical, environmental, social value etc.. to the society.
At the same time this kind of research is also a threat to "normal" research. Pressuring scientist to produce research with commercial potential will not make better science. Probably quite the opposite. The idea of science is that it should be "open" and be beneficial to all of us by increasing our knowledge is something we will lose with commercial research.
So I think that we need to make sure that both these kind of research can exists without limiting or hurting the other. This is probably done by critically analyzing where the research is going and making sure that there is always a balance between these two.
Hi guys! You have an interesting discussion here. While preparing my post-reflection post, I found a very interesting and useful paper about the distinction between design-oriented research and research-oriented design. I think that it is a very complex question but it would be interesting to discuss it. As I understood, in case of design-oriented research, the research is the area and it has the goal to produce new knowledge. But the aim of research-oriented design is to create new products.
RaderaSo research-oriented design is "commercial" focused research in your terms and design-oriented research is "normal". But researchers recognize both types of research.