Theme 1
I enjoyed the discussion we had about cloning, the siamese twins might have been stretching it but it was interesting to say the least. Unfortunately I didn't dare talking TOO much that day with my voice being in shambles.
I think a lot of us agree that especially Kant was hard to grasp when first reading it, but that it slowly sank in over the week after the lecture and seminar.
Like most of the other persons who commented already I opened my eyes when I saw the passage about our prior experiences being an obstacle while trying to be objective.
I think you are on to something here, considering how a lot of research want to find legitimacy in referencing previous studies that are already accepted, and because of that cement a view of the world we already have. I'm not sure that I 100% agree that age is the deciding factor here but rather "experience", in the sense that you get comfortable in doing your work the same way you always did rather than being a rebel who question everything. Now don't get me wrong, the older researcher most likely have more experience, but I don't think age is the primary factor.
Either way, a really interesting thought that made me think even more about the question of objectivity.
Hi there, I agree with so much in your post regarding how the learning curve looked during the first theme. There is however something I believe you have mixed up (or maybe I'm the one who is confused).
The analytic judgement is the one where the predicate is present in the subjects concept. To use your example "All bachelors are single".
A synthetic judgement however is the one you might have to investigate empiricaly, e.g. "All bachelors are unhappy". We knew from earlier that all bacherlors are single, but can we be sure that all of them are unhappy about this?
At least that is what I understood from the lecture, and a peak at wikipedia seems to support my belief. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_distinction
Anyway, a good post overall, and like the others I love the puppy.
Hi I might have missunderstood your reflection post, but I'm not sure I totally agree with everything you wrote about analytic and synthetic judgements. From my understanding it is like this:
What defines analytic judgements is that the predicate of the judgement is part of the subjects concept. E.g. "All bachelors are unmaried".
A synthetic judgement could be "All bachelors are unhappy", the previous example was analytic because unmarried is part of the definition of a bachelor, but unhappy is not, hence why it's synthetic. In this case we can not know if the judgement is true a priori either.
The interesting part is when we come to synthetic a priori knowledge, according to Kant (as I understand it), your example of "2+2 = 4" is synthetic, because the predicate "equals 4" is not part of the subjects "2" and "2"s concept. We still know that the quation is true, and as far as I know this is an example of synthetic a priori knowledge.
As far as I understand it, “objects conforming to our cognition” can be explained by the school book version of Kant saying "we can't know anything about the world itself, all we can know is how we perceive it through our faculties of knowledge". That is we humans can never observe the world as it is from god's point of view, Because of that we have to accept the fact that we will always look at the world through "colored glasses" where our opinions are are tainted by our past experiences and values.
Reading Kant really was as close to a punch in the face I have gotten while reading, but I find myself understand more even as I'm commenting. A shame that you can't make a post-post reflection.
I would have loved to be part of the infinity discussion, seems like it was really interesting.
Theme 2
I totally agree with you regarding the dangers of mass and social media. I think we all have a couple of friends who constantly like or share things on facebook without looking at the content critically. I personally daily see post originating from the left and right wings of the political spectrum in my feed. I decided to not block them because it is kind of amusing to do something as simple as a an image search on the pictures used in articles to see how people mislead eachother.
The blind leads the blind…
Nice reflection, I especially like the part about sub- and superstructure while linking it to movies. Something that got me thinking however was your example of aura in cars. I totally agree that the first car, or let's say a custom painted/modified sports car have an aura because of it uniqueness. Can a mass produced car however even have aura? You say it has less, but hasn't the aura withered completely when it's just one of many?
Other than this, a really nice reflection!
I agree with you that Benjamin see the withering of the aura as something positive because it makes it available to the mass. Like the teacher said during our seminar, Benjamin see this as something empowering for the working class where they are no longer left our of art that previously was often only available to the social elite. I also see this as one part of the connection to Benjamin's view on why art has revolutionary potential.
Like the previous poster I also like your conclusion about nominalism stating that it lacks vision. If we are only to observe the world with a perception that is largely colored by an already cemented world view, I believe we are bound to stand still in it. I think we need the abstract concepts, groupings etc. to make new theories, I personally saw this in the papers I read for the themes after this where new theories were defined with the help of these groups to find connections, it's limitations and scope.
Overall good examples for all points you are making and it seems like you understood this theme well after the week. Do you still find something unclear after the seminar or did you get all your questions answered? Either way a good summary.
Theme 3
What I liked the most in your reflection is that you brought up weak theory, something I didn't do myself. While the example of ice cream and sharks might be easy to understand, I personaly think the distinction gets harder when not looking at obvious examples. Would any theory that doesn't try to predict its own failures be considered weak? I'm not sure myself but it's an interesting topic to think about imo.
Anyway, great that you feel that you know the difference between hypothesis and theory, since it's indeed a word that is used quite different in every day life.
A good summary of what was discussed during the theme and I really enjoy your scientific cycle! I actually drew something similar in a less detailed form during the small group discussions in my seminar.
I'm not sure I fully agree with you on applied research however. While those types of studies does rely mainly on old theory and want to find a solution for a real world problem, the results can still have knowledge contribution to theory in my opinion.
I agree with you about the question regarding theory and truth being very interesting. I would say that a good theory would be the best explanation of a phenomenon available with the knowledge we have that is widely accepted. It is however not nessecarily the truth. Anyway I enjoyed reading your reflection, the only thing I missed was the difference between theory and hypothesis.
Hi!
Some of the differences between Gregor and Sutton/Staw might be explained by them being in different fields of study and having different views on theory. What I think they mean however with just quoting old theory is that you have to perform your own logical reasoning with the help of old knowledge and data before you have achieved knowledge contribution. At least that's my take on it.
Overall a nice reflection and glimpse into what you learned last week.
I think it's great that you brought up the point about theory being linked to the current paradigm, which is important to keep in mind.
Like the majority of people I talked to agree with, the difference between theory and hypothesis is ignored in everyday life. If i recall correctly it was actually Leif Dahlberg slapped that truth to us in our first semester when I began my studies at KTH. Not sure if that class was still mandatoy when you guys started however. Either way, it has stuck with me since.
I get the feeling you understand the topic well after the lecture and seminar.
Theme 4
http://reb2572.blogspot.se/2015/10/post-theme-4.html?showComment=1444661875641#c1048481461354002745
I agree with pretty much everything you are saying in this reflection, even though I would like to rephrase your statement about quantitative methods being unable to explain complex questions.
It can defenitely be hard, but I think it's more about defining and redefining your research question(s) to understand what you want to achieve (yea I know it's cheating to write comments after the Haibo Li lecture), and make sure your hypotheses are well stated.
I would argue you could find really unexpected connections that would be really hard to see with qualitative methods, as long as you designed your tests properly, like you also mention.
On the other hand, even though I just spent my whole arguing the possibility, it might not always be the easiest way to use qualitative methods.
It is good to see that you learned much from this weeks theme, and it's even better that you give an explanation for all your points instead of just listing them.
Good job covering the theme, and it was refreshing reading a different experience than most others during this week.
I totally agree with you about the point of learning more about qualitative methods than quantitative during the theme. Qualitative methods themselves are not really hard to understand even though the math behind it might be. But then again we didn't really mention that at all except for a few quick mentions.
It's by looking at the situations where quantitative methods were less suited that I learned more about the qualitative.
A really well written reflection and an important lesson to learn that the way you ask the questions will affect the outcome. I think it's a trap that is very easy to fall into, being too eager to look at the results that you forget to look at if what you are asking are really giving the subjects to have a different opinion than what you are looking for.
I would dare say if the point mentioned above would be the only thing you take with you from this course, it would still have been worth taking it.
Theme 5
While I agree with Marcus that the clip from Johnny English was a bit too long (could have skipped the first minutes), I think it's a very good example of why finding an alternative solution might be preferable.
I totally agree with you about the fact that it was kind of hard to find papers using qualitative methods, and even more so a case study where you really got to look at the process. I guess that is the drawback of the limited space you are given when submitting a paper to a journal.
You might be able to solve it like the thief did, or in the example of head tracking by having the camera at the monitor. This is however much harder and requires much more effort due to technical limitations of the camera, or requires acrobatics and energy in the case of the thief.
By redefining your idea of a solution, you might end up getting the same result like getting past a hurdle with less problems. This is why Haibo said you should spend 90% of the time refining your idea, then just 10% of the time solving it.
Haibo and Anders talked about prototypes from different perspectives, which I think caused some confusion after the lectures. Haibo talked from a commercial point of view where prototypes indeed often work as proof of concept to aquire funding.
Anders however talked from a pure theoretical research point of view, and he himself said something along the lines of "I don't have to care at all about if what I find can generate any money" (I can't remember the exact quote). His interest is all about gaining new knowledge, which is the reason to why he look at prototypes differently. To him it's about provoking a discussion to help him gain said knowledge, and he did this by knowingly leaving out functionality that might be vital to a commercial product.
Others have already given you some points from the second lecture that you missed, but I will add something I felt was important as well. When conducting design research your empirical data will be different from that in a study using quantitative/qualitative methods. Here the data and knowledge contribution can be seen as the lessons learned during the study.
The way I understood Haibo when he talked about math, is that understanding how things are connected, they could understand before testing multiple solutions that mounting a camera on a subjects head would give the highest precision for tracking the motion of the head. If I remember correctly this method would result in 10 times higher resolution.
While engineers might not always need to sit with a calculator all days, understanding the underlaying math will help you solve a lot of problems because you see the logic in it.
It seems like you covered pretty much everything being discussed during the lectures, while it's just a small detail the only thing I missed was a more clear mention of Haibo and Anders using prototypes for different reasons. You cover both points of view, as did Anders quickly in his lecture. Still a good reflection!
Theme 6
I totally agree with you about the fact that it was kind of hard to find papers using qualitative methods, and even more so a case study where you really got to look at the process. I guess that is the drawback of the limited space you are given when submitting a paper to a journal.
I also found the "anything goes" quote interesting, mainly because it went against all the norm of strict rules on e.g. conduct a quantitative study to get proper results.
I enjoyed reading your reflections and just wanted to put in a word about qualitative methods for media technology. I would say that using contextual interviews or "thinking aloud" are very useful methods while testing e.g. a GUI or similar making it highly relevant for us to learn.
I would also have liked to see a lecture on the subject but good to see that you feel like you understand case studies after the seminar anyway.
I'm happy my experience with the longitudinal studies felt at least a little interesting! To be honest I had completely forgot about that research method, given it was 10 years I was part of that study. It is however a very interesting one that could give you great results if you manage to find a good balance of time used to perform it.
I felt like we had a good discussion going and you have covered all the important points covered.
Something I would like to clarify is the question about hypotheses. It is true that you do not have any while starting a case study, gather the data and analyze it. However after that is done, you do formulate hypotheses in an effort to explain what you have concluded already. After that you reiterate to test said knowledge and maybe find out something new. I believe it's step 6 in Eisenhardt's list.
A very interesting example of quantitative methods being used on a single person that I would have enjoyed listening to myself. However like the person above me noted, it will be hard getting a high statistical significance on only 1 subject, but what are you supposed to do when no others are available?
It's a shame no lecture was given, would have been nice to get an indepth example of a well performed case study with examples of all the steps being used.
