Theme 5: Design research

1. How can media technologies be evaluated?
Depending on what product you want to evaluate different methods can be used. In the article they tested the users effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Three factors that were important for there product. It is important to know what will be the limitation of a product and what will drive the users to buy it knowing this is easy to know how to test the product.

2. What role will prototypes play in research?
Prototypes roll in research is to give a picture of what the design will look like.
When designing something you can never really know what the costumers will like about it. Sometimes you as the designer are to involved into the product that you can’t really see it from a costumers eyes. When designing something there is a lot of things to think of so it is easy to forget about some elements.
When doing a prototype you get to try the product out on a real costumer. Thing maybe are to hard for the costumer to understand, or there is some design issue and so on. It is a good way of testing the product out in a stage were the product still can be changed. One new example is the new iPhone, a short time after the release a lot of the costumers started complain that the phone easily bended in the pocket. It is hard to know however the developers knew about this and did nothing about it. But looking at it now they should have. iPhone probably did some prototype that they tried out and maybe still missed this think. But this kind of bad designing problems is one good example of what you are trying to find when prototyping and testing the product at the stage were changes still can be made.

3. Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?
When creating a product a lot of things needs to work. There needs to be a market, there needs to be technology that can create the product or material etc. The proof of concept prototype is when you tries the product if it really work, if it’s going to be feasible. This is done so that product that no one whats don't get developed.


4. What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?
There can be a lot of deferent characteristics of a prototype, it can by on paper just a drawing, made as a fully done product done with no features, a website, a app, a first draft on the real product. The prototype is not the real product and can be on every step and level during the creation of the new product. The limitation of prototypes is that it is very good to do it a lot but it takes a lot of time and money.

5. How can design research be communicated/presented?
I think it is a good way of showing the product as a prototype. But it is important to choose the right type of prototype. Sometimes if the the real product is missing some important features and does not look like it should then it maybe is better to just draw a prototype to visualize it. To make the audience understand how the real product will really look like.