Theme 5 - Reflection

This week I have read the texts “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration.” and “Finding design qualities in a tangible programming space” as well as “Differentiated Driving Range”. Even though there were three different texts to read I didn’t find this week to be very cumbersome, partly because the language weren’t that hard to comprehend and partly because I found them to be somewhat fun to read. Since we didn’t have to pick our own papers or journals it was easier and faster to begin the task and to get into the texts. I think I understood most of the material, and only needed to look up some words, I also found the texts to be kind of well paced and grouped together in a way which encouraged continuous reading. Some texts earlier in the course were not as easily comprehensible and needed quite a few stops to think about what I had just read, just to understand it.

We didn’t have a seminar for this week's theme and thus I did not prepare anything special, like questions and such. I don’t think it was a good trade off with another lecture instead of a seminar since I have learned a lot more on the group discussions than on the lecture.

As the theme suggests we learned a lot about design and the process and intentions behind it. How prototypes play a big part in development, what they are good for and where they stop helping. I have also learned about different forms of data, primarily empirical data. What it is, what it’s good for, how to gather and analyze it and also how to compare it.

Earlier weeks there have mostly been a couple questions which made it feel like I could put a lot of focus on them. This week, however, there were pretty many questions to answer which made it feel like i learned less about more. I guess that doesn’t have to be bad, but it’s different.