Evaluating and reflecting upon Theme 5

This week's theme presented two seperate research papers with some connection to design research, and a couple of questions in regards of such research. I found it interesting to read two papers that, in this case, were very well connected to media technology and also that the authors had connections to our institution as well. I therefore looked very much forward to take part of their lectures this week as well. However, I could sadly only attend Haibo Li's lecture due to the many clashes in my schedule this semester.

Haibo chose to talk quite generic about academic design research. He covered his thoughts on how to come up and nurture ideas, how to realize them in the best way through specific perspectives, as well as which ideas he thought we should try to persue. As he put it, we need the businessman perspective when we look at research ideas and answer the questions if the idea is realizable, if it has the right timing, if it can be commercialized etc. It was basically some hands-on evidence that the competitive climate for universities is really going global. I have not really heard much of such rhetoric here in Sweden before so those thouhts kind of caught me off guard. But of course, if KTH wants to maintain, or even climb on university ranking lists, more research has to be globally aknowledged. When I studied an exchange semester in Australia, the climate was very much like so. So I believe that it is a trend that is here to stay and that universities will start looking more and more towards commercial gains rather than purely knowledge-based gains. I would say that such a development is a little bit sad - universities should not be run for commercial purposes in my opinion. But I can understand why so is happening though. And even if it might hinder the breadth of research, it might enhance the quality of it.

As I could not attend Ylvas lecture, I took the opportunity to read some more blog posts on this week's theme than I usually do. I was not very surprised when I saw that people tended to have quite a good idea about what design research and prototyping was and why it was important. This, as I see it, is probably because of the quite extensive use of such methodology in media technology. In fields such as human-computer interaction, programming and visualization (which are big fields in our media technology program), the use of prototyping is very apparent. I therefore believe many of the students taking this course had good insights about design research even before this week's theme.