Pre-theme 5 : Design research

Texts read :
Finding design qualities in a tangible programming space - Fernaeus & Tholander
Differentiated Driving Range - Lundström 

What is the 'empirical data' in these two papers?

Those papers acquires their empirical data through two different ways. The first paper offers a collecting data through the observation of children's actions when they interact with the experimental designs, the prototype.The second acquires those data in different ways, through the stat of art analysis and an iterative design exploration and finally interviews in order to understand how the guess-o-meters works.

Can practical design work in itself be considered a 'knowledge contribution'?

Obviously, it would depend on the definition of what we think of knowledge. In my point of view, it can be considered as knowledge contribution. The learn by doing improves the way you perceive the object and increase or knowledge based on our experience with our failures. Moreover, being a way and not a destination, it allows to open doors to wider researches.

 

Are there any differences in design intentions within a research project, compared to design in general?

The design intentions within a research project is precisely chosen. You can adapt your design intentions with what you aim to do. This is one particularity that allows the researcher to have a clearer way for his research project. The researcher can in his design intentions put the user in the center of the research, called user entered or keep it self centred and experience it yourself. The difference that shines from this is instead of putting the light on the sensation for general design the researcher would shine the light on the functionality aspect. One offers a new knowledge (Design intention) the other see that everything works as intended (design in general)

Is research in tech domains such as these ever replicable? How may we account for aspects such as time/historical setting, skills of the designers, available tools, etc? 

They may be replicable but it depends mostly on how the research has been conducted. We have to keep in mind the aim of the initial study, the knowledge of the researcher that first tried it. In order to replicate all the correct conditions. Moreover, the study which is going to be replicable needs to be user center, otherwise the self centred research can be hardly replicable. This is why its important that we take into account every aspects in order to make it the more identical as the first one so at the end of theses researches it can lead to better and further development in the tech domain. it's important to understand older research to create news one. It needs a continual and infinite development.

Are there any important differences with design driven research compared to other research practices?

The Driven research depends on the users to try it in order to get as maximum data as impossible. The more we have the more accurate the research will be. This is a qualitative process, users give feedback and this is precious because the research aims to be used by others. So they are the best one to give their opinion on what works and what not. Once they all have tried it, the research can draw very accurate conclusions on what has been liked and what has been hated. And go in the right direction for the rest of the research.

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Post-theme 3 : Research and theory

Lecture + Seminar

The seminar widen my vision upon the world about theory. This is more complicated to represent as It seemed to be.  As a lot of people mentioned in the seminar and will probably mention in their blog, a theory provides an explanatory framework for an observer. What does that really mean?

In order to understand what theory represents, we have to start from the very beginning. Before everything, we have to ask ourselves some question, what am I looking for, what am I doing this for .... The aim is to understand and answer a "Why". Once we do, we have the question and ready to start the research process.

Raw data, information, etc. By themselves they are pretty useless and don't mean much without the meaning or the purpose of the theory. But once added up, we start to see a certain pattern between the numbers... The pattern starts to answer in some weird and unnoticed ways the question we first asked ourselves. 

Then once we have our question and the results of our researches we can start elaborate some hypothesis in order to narrow down to what we are really looking for. 

Once everything is done we can create our theory on what we just talked and searched about.

Even though this would be the perfect way to do this, lots of theories has been created with a very messy process. Meaning that the search the hypothesis are a bit random from each other... Most of the time, you have a main theory and a lots of information about the question but something invalid it and it redefines your body of work and make you start over. This is an ongoing process. Called "Anarchist Theory".

The aim here is to build your theory on existing theory. I will finish this blog by the closest definition of theory I could come up with.

With my group during the seminar we came up with a theory I had already explained in my first blog reception saying that theory, or at least ideas, truths or any objection concept we believe in, will be true and stay true until proven othewise. We used the example of the black and brown bear, saying that all of those animals are only black and brown, until we find one white. And the theory will modify itself from All bears are black and brown to All bears are black, brown and white. Until we find a pinky bear.
Are we therefore to accept this as a truth or shall we reject it because we are never sure. For example, if the actual truth is only black and brown bears, we deep down we believe that there will be a white one someday and that means our current truth is false, should we reject totally this current truth without knowing if the white bear will come some day ? I'm asking this question because science can be the black and brown bears. Until they discover something new, we have to believe in our current truth.

To conclude with a definition of theory based on what I just said above, I would go with this definition :
A theory is made of propositions that aims to identify objects and their relation to each other.

This definition puts in perspective the things i've mentionned above, their relation to each other, their timeframe in time and space.

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Pre-Theme 4 : Quantitative research

Text read : 

Do Men Advance Faster Than Women? Debunking the Gender Performance Gap in Two Massively Multiplayer Online Games - Journal of computer-mediated communication
JCMC Two Year Impact Factor: 3.117
JCMC Five Year Impact Factor: 3.799

IEEE VR 2012 - Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality

I have chosen the article " Do men advance faster than women in video games. The main focused was to determine if the usual conception that female gamer are usually worst better than male gamer was true.  In a world that tends to a more open world to video games, the question seemed to matter in order to not have the same misspercetion about the gender in the video game world as in the business world or any other world for the matter.

They based their studies upon the USA's population and the chinese population. And in two video games EverQuest II and Chevalier Romance III. Both game offers a long game experience that allows the player to improve his character over time.

Each participant records their timeplayed (which is a option directly in the game), their class of their charactere in the game, their player gender and their interaction in the virtual world. All their data was calculated upon the Kenward-Roger method. Study based on about 10 000 players. (80% male/20% female)

The study could have been wrong in the sense where player could have lied about their gender, but there would be no reason to do so.

The resultat shows that women perform as well as man do over time. There are, by definition, no disctinction to be made between male and female in a video game. (Of that kind at least) And therefore, believing in that way constitutes the first step for unequality in videogames.
But this study opens a door to understand why female are not that very commun on a very competitive level. (E-sport).

This is the limitation of this study. The results may differ upon the type of game studied. Future studies in various game genres and diverse cultures are needed to confirm the generalizability of findings reported here.

But overall, their method was very  rigorous. And they open up a whole new possibility of case study. This is the first of a long serie in order to determine more accuratly the video game industry and the distinction between male and female and might it be the first step of removing the cliches between Male and Female.

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The druming experience was a very interesting article based on virtual reality and the illusion of our body. Do we modify who we are based on how our body looks. Even though this was based on drum (which is a very good music indicator to determine how we react), our virtual body ownership illusion is a great concept to grasp.

This study compares if people will play, act, move differently if they have a different body (Gender, skin tone, etc) in the game and in the reality. So they incarnated different personnalities and see how they react.

Lots of study material to collect the data from each session for each individuals,  based on how the upper body reacts and "danse" to the drum's music and depending on which body they were incarnating.

The difference between male and women didn't matter a lot. Maybe the music isn't a source of differenciation between gender. More of a skin tone matter. Result, yes people play the drum differently depending on how they look in the game and no how they look in real life. The body ownership illusion has completly modify their personnality.

This qualitative study allows to focus on what the researchers are really looking for. This allows a more precise study and a better understanding of things since we can look closer to each result. However, the more result we have, the less possible it is to look closely to each and every result.

This quantitative study allows to have a wide panel of results and that we can determine pattern and diagnose with the results. It's proven to be right since a large number proves that a lot of people reacts, act that way. However, it is hardly possible to have a deeper understanding of thing as the qualitative study.

Both have their benefices and limitations and they are complementary and not distinct.

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Pre-Theme 3 : Research and theory

Text read : 
Driving a Wedge Between Evidence and Beliefs : How Online Ideological News Exposure Promotes Political Misperceptions - Journal of computer-mediated communication - 4august2016
JCMC Two Year Impact Factor: 3.117
JCMC Five Year Impact Factor: 3.799



Gregor, S. (2006). The Nature of Theory in Information Systems. 
Sutton, R. I. & Staw, B. M. (1995). What Theory is Not. 


As mentionned above, i've been searching some article in a well famous journal called : The journal of computer-mediated communication. As the title relates, it is web-based on the correlation between the media and computer world and their use in the social world.
It explores various and many subjects such as : Political, Sociology, Psychology, Science, Education, Business and so on. Most of the time related to the media technology.

I've chosen the article called "Driving a Wedge Between Evidence and Beliefs : How Online Ideological News Exposure Promotes Political Misperceptions". 
The title expressed a significant idea from nowadays. The misperceptions that we are victims in the internet and that we are not aware of. For most of us. This article had 2 goals in mind while writing it. To prove that exposure to ideological online news media contributes to political misperceptions. And at the same time exposes the 3 differents forms of how those misperceptions are created through media.

The paper starts on different definition over the words they are going to use in the paper so they start by claryfing the possible misperceptions about the misperceptions they are gonna talk about. Pretty clever. The study here is based on the election of 2012 in America where different surveys and analysis were made.
Those 3 forms of political misperceptions are described in logical order.
First, the lack of familiarity with the evidences. As an internaute, we do not have all the information (Hence the reason we are going on a news website) and this is the most made mistakes by a lot of people all over the internet. They do recommend to use others to fill the gap that seems unclear of unfit to the reality.
Then misunderstanding the evidence. Even though using this risky strategy such as ometting an important factor, a bit of twisting in the narration of the story, or add atypical element to the article can lead to important amend if discovered this is often use to controle the population from underneath. Through the last 2 years, the most missleading aspect of web-based news are the missleading title such as : Waow, Donald Trumps walks on a kid's face. The goal here is to promote the traffic on their website by attracting the attention of the internaute. And then the potential evidence or information inside will be neglected due to this title.
Finally, the last but not least form is the misperceptions despite knowing the evidence, the real fact.
Knowing the evidence is not the same as believing in.
For example, the global climat change linked to the presidential's programm. (republican) They started by tearing down the scientist community. Therefore the belief in this community decreased and the belief on what they were working decreased as well. And at the same time, while election are running in, people tend to believe what their party's is suggesting.

From what I read of this article was very interesting, because they did the opposite of what they were demonstrating in the article. We can see their profesionnalism to the different references they are using, studies and analysis and they always bring an evidence to support their claims. Well structured so we easily understand without any missperception whatsoever. And they even suggest that this study can be pushed further for more detailled vision of this global misperception of the political sphere.

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What is theory ? What is not ?

Let's start with what is not. Collecting information in an empirical way in itself is not theory. By that, raw data, variables, diagrams, etc can't be defined as theory.
Theory however is built on those. To explain an observation (through raw data) in a logical way, understand the relationships in a true timed order event.

The major theory in this paper describes the different form of the actions that uses web media onto the political world in order to manipulate the consumer's reading. The goal is to show the theory and exposes it in order to be aware of those and not be affected by them.

The benefits of this kind of theory : Theory of explanation (according to gregor) is the better understanding of a selected situation. You use those theories in some particular missinterpreted field, or not very well known to the people.

The limitation of such a theory is that it doesn't give any answers to contradict the problem they are explaining. Moreover, it can be searched more and therefore, there can be other problem that they didn't refer to. The more the time passes, the more information we can have, so it can become obsolete at one point. This is an explanation for this time now and won't be of any use in a few years as the system change pretty quickly.

Post-theme 2 : Critical media studies

Lecture + seminar

This seminar gave me a different approach on the terms we were initially reading about. Beginning with the Enlightnment. Adorno & Horkeimer live in the Enlightment movement. They pushed the reflection to the study of the enlightment itself. The one that in order to find out more about the world, we had to destroy the myths communly known. Through calculation and theories, we can redefine our vision of the world. We learn about which we didn't know so we can know. For a more concrete example, this enlightnment offered the world a certain domination over the others species. We had a need to find our limits, ours boundaries, the example of climbing moutains or working on solving technical problem (boat on water - Titanic) has been made.

I used the Allegory of the cave, that we revisited in the seminar to explain my vision of things about the dialectic. This process of thinking, logical thinking. But this is only on a episotmology level. Marx took it to the next level by using this dialectic on a Ontology level. What is ... So we have to be able to do both in order to relate on it accordingly.
We pushed a bit further in the allegory of the cave, things that I did not mention enough in my first blog, the nominalism that is metaphored in this allegory. The reflected chair that appears as a shadow for the prisonners is a chair but is it really what it is ? This nominalism is a form of pure domination over others. This conceptualisation allowed people to opress by making it generalised. Such as the Nazi ... But that can also be used in a better form such as the Human Rights.

Every myth is an imaginary truth that fills a void in our knowledge so that we can survive our need for an explanation for everything until we can actually start the correct science and find out about what this is really about. We used to fill this gap with a lots of myths (Religion, Sci-fi Stories, the world was open to imagination). But know what drives the humankind is this need to understand and prove the real truth about it. ( As far as real means). This makes me think about a sentence of Stephen Hawkings "We need a theory of everything".

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 I will start by mentionning my previous blog " The essay of Walter Benjamin begins by pointing out two different term to describe how society interacts in itself. A particularity that shouldn't be forgotten or avoided when trying to interact with the history of the society. Superstructure and substructure. The base of a Superstructure are the substructures. Those substructures allow the superstructure to exist. Each substructures bring with them a part of the current society. "
The substructures for his era was the machinery, production, etc. Today, we can see them in the media technology department as the mobile phone, computers, access to knowledge, sharing information with the world through Google.
And the superstructure englobes all that and makes the world where we live in, the world where we live in. Very different from before. Even though it changes very slowly. Today, we can see the evolution in the superstructure of the religion. The number of Atheist increases (Around 12% to 20% of the world) those lasts hundreds years. We used to have a number of atheist close to the 0%. This is in a grand part due to this access of information we have (The substructures mentionned above).

Finally, what made Benjamin's essay famous for, his conception of the aura, this uniqueness around a certain object, what makes it what it really is. Benjamin morn the copying process of an object art but at the same time he likes the idea that it allows everyone to access a very "rich" domain, Art. After my first reading I was confused on how Benjamin deal with this process of destroying the aura of art object but the seminar openned a new perspective about using this as a Superstructure changer. Allowing a private sector to become open to everyone, will, in a way, destroy the bourgoisie they were subjected to.

Revolution was on it's way.

Post-Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science.

Lecture + Seminar

Does the Knowledge I had before the seminar is the same as I have now ? Was it real knowledge back then ? Did I percieve things clearly or was I missdirected ?
After my personnal reading and writting on the matter, i've formed certain ideas, trying to find the direction Kant was directing us toward. After the seminar, where we had to discuss and entertain new ideas about this, we came upon a certain point of view about the subject. We have been able to discuss it with the lecturer and open our minds wider.

During the seminar we covered the basis so we can have a discussion with the same base. Once I got to understand :

“Perception without conception, is blind.

Conception without perception is empty.

 

This is the perfect sentence to understand what Plato meant by we do not see or hear with our eyes and ears, but we see or hear throught our eyes and ears. This means that we do have to go further from a first impression, understand the real meaning and don't take what we see for granted without the understanding. The eyes do not lie, but they can be lied to. What we believe and see may not be the same. And yet, we have to separate ourselves from this God's point of view and see and understand the things as we see them.

I, myself, use to think I could distance myself from things and react accordingly to the bigger picture. That I shall have enough distance to see things as they are and understand them. After reading Kant, it seems that my point of view seems to be far-fetched or at least, naive. But instead of following Kant's point of view on this matter, I'd rather keep mine and have an open mind on what he has to say about it.
My opinion on this has changed since we first started. I still think this is possible to have a "God's point of view" in order to observe, analyse things. But Kant offered an alternative to this. I do have to be aware that there are certain things I can't distance myself from. but if i'm aware of them and still want to have a bigger picture, I have to work on those i'm awared of and understand those things as they are (What Kant recommends)

Therefore, I would like to remove what I said about Kant in my previous blog :

"Kant in the other hand is not looking to create idea of our own but to expose is own truth". 

He certaintly explains his way of thinkings but it doesn't replace what we already think, it just comes and add a new way of seeings things.

About the discussion with my groups, we ended up thinking that in this world, we have 7 billions of worlds. That each and every one of us see the world as he sees it and it is not the same as his brother, friends of colleagues. But the more we share with people, the more knowledge we acquire about the world we live in by comparing our different point of view. And the more people are talking and sharing experiences, their own knowledges, the more the world becomes clearer. For example, thousands years back, we (As humankind) used to don't share anything other than family, the world was as small as our territory. Evolution happens and now, human beings share information with the whole world. Everyone has access to the Human's knowledge about the world. And it has never been more shared, talked and discussed. And for a more practical example; We all read Kant on our side by ourselves. But since we shared it in a seminar, our perception about Kant, knowledge has changed.

But hey, this is only how I percieve it. Care to share ?

 

Pre-Theme 2 : Critical media studies

Text read : 
Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity" (1936)
Adorno och Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) (First two chapters)

The essay of Walter Benjamin begins by pointing out two different term to describe how society interacts in itself. A particularity that shouldn't be forgotten or avoided when trying to interact with the history of the society. Superstructure and substructure. The base of a Superstructure are the substructures. Those substructures allow the superstructure to exist. Each substructures bring with them a part of the current society. They can be altered easily, therefore their initial structure modify instantly with those changes, they are the economic sphere of society such as ressources, machinery, production etc.
They do make all together the superstructure. Which means the abstract part of society, the intangible, for example : The religion, philosophy, and as Benjamin mentionned : Art.
The superstructure can evolves around time but it takes way much longer since those aren't tangible so we can't manualy modify them.

It seems we had the prelude of a part of this essay in the last texts through plato about how we perceive the world. Benjamin affirms that there are two layers on our perception : The first one is naturally determined, through our sense and experience. Followed by the historical aspect. That has to be mentionned otherwise we may misinterpret why it has been done that way. For example, (other than the one Benjamin offered) in Japan in 1966, year of the Fiery Horse, many couples avoided having children, creating a permanent dent in the japanese age structure and a modification of the perception of the fiery horse in the art's world.

Finally in his essay Benjamin talks about an "Aura". His definition is very interesting. Based on the superstructure, the perception through our senses and by the historical time a created object gets a certain Aura that can't be copied or reproduced, he insists on the fact that even the best re-création of an object will never be the same as the original because of this Aura that forbids any double of it. Therefore art can only be true, otherwise his esthetic value dissapears instantly.

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Dialectic of Enlightenment. I shall describe what Adorno and Horkheimer think about their definition of Enlightenment. Short version : Master of Nature. Their definition makes me think about the allegory of the cave of Plato : Two mens, chained in a cave without any possibility to look around and see something else than the shadows of human walking behind them projected by the fire. Their reality is that the shadows make the noise and move around. But one day, one prisonner is freed. He turned back and see the fire, he gets hurt badly by watching it, because he is not used to. He would prefer to go back to what he knew : The shadows. But after some angry behaviour and time for his eyes to adapt to this new reality, he can see other human beings, the light of the fire/sun and after a while he is able to watch the sun directly. So he understands the new reality (Here we can translate by "He has been enlightened" ). Therefore, he wants to tell the others prisonners that they live in a lie, that they must know the truth (The process of dialectic). But when he comes back into the cave, he can't see anything, he is not used to it anymore, he is blinds inside. So the others prisonners see that and think that going out of their cave will hurt them, so they would likely kill anyone who would try to drag them out of the cave. In my opinion, those reflect metaphoricaly the concept of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Finally, Adorno and Horkheimer mention the nominalism. That everything that exist or don't exists are basically names. Nominated. Therefore everything that can't be proven to be true, is not. It is as well correlated in order to make the difference between truth and myth. Knowledge, here again, can allow the personae to make the distinction between Truth & Myth.

Pre-Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science.

Text read : 
"Theaetetus", by Plato.
"Critique of pure Reason", by Kant.

Plato and Kant have different approach of defining and conceptualizing a concept, an idea. Plato through Socrate and Theaetetus explains the path to Knowledge. Socrate is used as a tool for Theaetetus to gets his own idea of Knowledge "SOCRATES : I must try by my art of midwifery to deliver Theaetetus of his conceptions about knowledge." With this way of doing things, the reader can understand both point of view on different opinion about knowledge, the good and the bad of each idea. The proeminent idea of the text is that "Knowledge is perception" but they conclude by saying that since we do not hear with our ears nor see with our eyes, knowledge can in no way be the same thing as perception because we hear through our ears and see through our eyes. Therefore, when the information comes in through an organ, the mind must put them together. At the end, they use the metaphor of an aviary as knowledge to make the distinction between Having and Possess.  I think this is the beginning of the real defiinition of knowledge. The one thing they didn't bring up in their conversation was experience. Can we have a true opinion, perception of the right thing without experiencing it ? Those are only theoritical, it will become knowledge as soon as we experience it, as soon as we prove it, as soon as acknowledge it.

Kant in the other hand is not looking to create idea of our own but to expose is own truth which appeared to have been proved since he uses the famous example of copernic to express his idea. The idea is discredites was mentionned by Plato "Man is the measure of all things". We shall not put the humankind in the center of everything otherwise we won't see things as they are but things as we see, as we percieve. As Kant mentionned we shall not see from our perspective (our cognition must conform to the objects) but from a greater point of view, from the god's point of view (Objects must conform to our cognition). We can apply this way of thinking about everything in our personnal life, therefore the "Why me?" feeling tends to dissapear. We did explain the first part of Kant's question :
 "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?
We ought to explains what he means by a priori knowledge. Those are the "axiomes" of life. Those are the things that are true without needing any experiment, experience or theory to prove them right. Even though in Science everything is true until proven otherwise.
Then we have the a posteriori knowledge. This knowledge is earned through experience. This is what is called : Empirical. We have an idea, but until proven, it will stay at the "Idea state". Once we experienced the idea, and it show that it is true, we have earned knowledge. A posteriori knowledge.

In conclusion, the closest definition of Knowledge I get from reading those texts are that we do need to experience things in order to acquire that "knowledge" but keep an open mind (A true opinion) while percieving things through a global point of view of everything.