Theme 5

Design Research

This week I read an article named “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” written by Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. It was based on the mobile phone vibration technology and researchers applied this technology to show football game. From this article, I got a primary conception about design research.

Every design research needs its own prototype. First of all, prototypes are the basis of new designs and provide the possibility to realize the performance of designs. In this article, the prototype is mobile phone vibration technology. Only by the emergence of vibration, designers can link human’s tactile sense to the perception of football game information. Without the creation of mobile phone vibration technology, people can only watch games directly on TV or other visual terminals. Thus, prototypes broaden new means for the existing phenomena. Also the different prototypes’ behaviors provide chances to express complex content. To take vibration models as examples, it is vibration with different frequency and magnitude that allow mobile phones to show various football locations and who control the ball. Then prototype’s characteristics limit the model of design as well. As only limited number of movement can be achieved in mobile phone vibration, when designing, designers must category all the football game information to fit prototype’s characteristics. Prototype decides how design can be constructed.

This article is a typical design research, and from that I can clearly know the structure of one design research. Firstly, authors should list theories behind the design. As design research is formed by prototypes and subjects, the theory should be stated in two parts respectively. Next part should be the depiction of design, just like the utilization of prototypes. Then, researchers need to verify the validity of design through experiments. In this part, the testees’ contracture, the process of experiment as well as the result should be listed out. Finally, researchers should provide the analysis as well as the conclusion of the practical applicability of one design.

I also found another research article name “Automatic speech recognition in cocktail-party situations: A specific training for separated speech”, which also follows the describing sequence above. It is based on prototype “Automatic speech recognition (ASR)” and the author designed a sound source separation technology to improve its quality. As what was stated before, the background and the fact of “Automatic speech recognition” are shown at first, and one question about bad performance of ASR in noisy place are left. Next part should be how design works like. In this article, the author used a chart to show the procedure of sound processing, which I highly recommended, because it can help readers understand the abstractive word on procedure better. Testing and verifying description is the third part, where author check the speech intelligibility in anechoic, reverberant, cocktail-party situation. Basing on different situation, author compared the degree of speech intelligibility before and after adopting sound source separation technology. At last, he analyzed the difference between the consequences speech intelligibility before and after adopting sound source separation technology, and introduction the utilization about this design.

Among all the design theory, the most variable part should be the experiment one. This article applies focus group to check the value of sound source separation technology. Among them, one group of people is designed to test the degree of speech intelligibility without the separation technology. On the other hand, the correct ratio is accounted by people with it. Gathering all of information together, author drew one picture of speech intelligibility in different sound environment, which can clearly shows the improvement after using sound source separation technology.