Theme 5 - Design Research - Reflection

The theme this week was design research. We had two lectures and the first one was with one of the writers, Ylva Fernaeus, of the paper that we read last week; ”Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses.” The lecture was very interesting and gave me a deeper understanding in what they thought during their research. Fernaeus described their process very well, which I think was one of the most interesting parts of the lecture she held. The first thing in a research process according to Fernaeus is to see something that everyone else missed out on. Then you start doing some research about it, you take notice and then you convince the people around about your idea/research and then they finally accept it.

Haibo Li held the second lecture, which was about ideas and problems. Great ideas, how do we come up with them? Li wanted us to think about the possibilities to come up with great ideas and make it happen. The lecture was more focused on the economic part of design research than I though at the beginning of the lecture but it was good to see the subject from a different angle. Li said that more focus and energy should be within defining the problem instead of trying to solve the problem. If you don’t know exactly what you research is about, if you don’t have a defined problem, then it’s going to be hard to solve the problem too. The timing should be right too, to be able to get a return on the investment of the research. I liked that it was more business in his way of seeing research than when I’ve been thinking about research before. It was like a quick introduction to how you can both do research and business at the same time, which I found quite inspirational.