Theme 5: Second blog post

I think theme five was one of the most interesting themes so far. Design research was totally new for me. Having a degree in business administration it was not legitimate and very uncommon to use any other research methods than basically quantitative or qualitative. 

Both in the seminar and the lecture we were discussing if possible to replicate design-oriented research within tech, it was also a question to answer in our first blog post. I have to re-think and evaluate. First of all the development of technology goes very fast, so you will most likely have new software prototypes and tools therefore you would probably not value to replicate a study. In my first blog post I wrote about the struggles with reproducing the result but that replication of the method is important now i understand that the meaning with replication is to conform an earlier study's findings either with the same condition or conditions that differ (Hornbæk et al. 2014m s. 3523). I believe the extent and value of replications depends of which field you use a design-oriented research in, in HCI and tech replication is not a cornerstone, the community rarely replicates research at all (Hornbæk et al. 2014). For design-oriented research it’s more important with relevance than validity as two researchers with the same problem frame will probably not produce similar artifacts at all. Although I believe the likelihood to increase relevance would be (in most cases) higher if starting with replicating and then extend research. I think it’s important to value prior findings no matter which field of research. I understand that it’s some challenges to replicated experiment as the technology and the social acceptance of it change rapidly. However it has some value, for example to be able to generalize result past sample. Our teacher talked about that there are no or little value to replicate a tech study because of the complexity between behavior of the user and the system, I claim that the only purpose with replicating is not to conform validity it’s to extend theory and making science cumulative. If there are limitations in a study replication might expand that research and examine new context. In my eyes replications doesn’t need to be just repetition of a study it’s new explorations and allows science to self-correct (Jones 2010). I find support for my arguments in lots of studies (please see reference list).

We were also discussing if the goal with design research is the development processes or as I understood it, the process aim to gain knowledge that you use to create new.  Our teacher added to the discussion that what differ a design-oriented researcher from other research is the discuss and conclusion, the ability to build on the results outcome, to move knowledge into products or employing the process into future problems. 

Reference list:

Hornbæk, K., Sander, S.S., Bargas-Avila, J., and Simonsen, J.G. (2014) Is once enough? On the extent and content of replications in human-computer interaction. Proc. of CHI 2014, 3523–3532.

Lallemand, C., Koenig, V., and Gronier, G. Replicating an International Survey on User Experience: Challenges, Successes and Limitations. RepliCHI 2013 Workshop.

Jones, K.S., Derby, P.L., and Schmidlin, E.A. An investigation of the prevalence of replication research in human factors. Human Factors, 52, 5 (2010), 586–595.