THEME 6 - Post-Posting - Qualitative and Case Study Research

This is the last post-posting I'll do for this course, as this week symbolizes the closure of the DM2572 course for me. Interestingly enough, I have been pleased to realize that week after week, my ability to analyze issues and understand research articles got much better than in the beginning. Of course, this can also be related to the fact that I got more used to speaking English, having been here in Sweden for a little more than a month now. Still, I believe that this course helped me a lot in understanding important issues and how to practically solve them. 

During our seminar, we talked more about case study research than qualitative research - as most people have already, like in Theme 4, had the opportunity to face qualitative studies and quantitative studies for their bachelor. I personally wasn't in that case, but still didn't really feel the need to go over again the difference between both, as we had already spent quite a long time during the Theme 4 seminar to discuss this issue. We then exposed the methods that were used in our papers - for example, focus groups, semi-structured interviews, auto-driving... Interestingly enough, I felt that these methods go hand in hand with the numerous methods we have in User Interface and Experience testing; to evaluate a prototype and see if it fits or to pinpoint issues that we have to correct. I feel like the fact that for both these goals we need to delve deeper in order to understand the subject plays a major role in the correlation between the used methods.

Another thing I liked about the seminar is that we got to discuss our papers - I feel like it's somehow a shame that we often didn't think to talk about what we've learned thanks to them, because we mainly talk in the seminars about the questions that we had to answer to. It could have been interesting during the other themes as well to share the conclusions we each drew about our papers, but it's a pity I didn't realize this before the last theme... 

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THEME 5 - Post-Posting - Design Research

This week's seminar was replaced by another lecture : this somehow made me realize how enriching a seminar can be, especially since it allows one to compare ideas with other people - which I sadly didn't get to do for this theme. This leads me to one important point concerning this post : I am not that confident in terms of what I have learnt, what I have understood, as compared to what I might have taken with me from the other week's themes. This is sadly going to be quite lacking in terms of added value, as we have all attended the same lectures and most likely will all be putting the same type of thoughts and reflexions in our posts, and I apologize for that in advance..

The first lecture was about design and problem solving. The most important thing in terms of problem solving is to take the time to reflect on the actual issue : how do we define a problem? As illustrated by the teacher, the student and the hungry bear, we can see that depending on how you structure that problem, the solving of the issue is going to be that much faster, or slower. 

In regards to idea design, the value that a great idea adds to a product is the most important thing. Rather than focusing on a breakthrough technique or invention, the idea is the one thing that is going to sell the product - take the example of Facebook : as the teacher said, it's an innovation based on a technological platform, but in no way is it a technological innovation. And this underlines again the importance of the idea in design research, especially if we're talking about the industry. But we've got to be careful - many ideas come up, and most look interesting. To filter them, we've got to have a business mind, capable of prioritizing. With proof of concept, we can validate the chosen idea. 

Accordingly to the articles we've read earlier in the week, Haibo Li stressed again the need for prototypes and user-experience in testing the product : this responds to the important question of idea evaluation. And, when we eventually come up with our final product, it's time for commercial selling - the elevator pitch, basically. 

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THEME 4 - Post-Posting - Quantitative Research

This week's theme was an eye-opener for me. I have always put more value in quantitative research rather than qualitative research. After having read the recommended literature, and selected one paper for our pre-seminar, I realized I couldn't have been more wrong. 

Indeed, during the seminar we talked about objectivity: just like in last week's theme, we're generally very quick to brandish words like "truth", "objective", "false", "subjective"… But in research, it's best not to resort to that, as we very often realize that the results we get can't help but be related to the way we've designed the study, within our certain framework, set of data, decisions and starting concepts. Why have we chosen drums, and not piano? Why white people and not black people? 

In this sense, while the general preconception would be that because quantitative studies often produce results in the form of numbers (which we, as scientists, love, worship, and more specifically don't question… sadly), we think they're more "reliable", more likely to be accepted. I was in this case as well. Thankfully, the seminar and lecture changed my point of view: now that I know the design of the study is the one subjective, questionable, deniable, point, I realize that a big part of the study's reliability boils down to the skills of the researcher - might the study be quantitative or qualitative. Best would be that it's a mix of both. 

In this sense, deciding to conduct a quantitative/qualitative study generally comes parallel to the design process - there are things more adapted to be quantified than others, for example character and personality traits generally would be difficult to reduce to just a few numbers. The same goes in terms of "wicked problems" : trying to quantitatively design a product to solve that problem only using measurements isn't enough, we have to go into many more aspects - and thus, controlling the outcome becomes much more hazardous. That's why we have to use a mix of quantitative and qualitative. While the standardization of the quantitative methods offers the possibility to have a uniform metric for different people, the benefits of having the possibility to vary our measurements sure show when we use a qualitative method. By doing this, we get deeper knowledge, and an interrelation between the results that quantitative and qualitative methods give us. An example that illustrates the benefits of the comparison would be conducting a qualitative method to measure the amount of candy you ate last week (do you feel you ate a lot of candy? Or little ?) then, conducting a quantitative method, and comparing results: this would shed light on our perception of quantity, on the concept of guilt, or want… But of course, it still depends on sample selection (for the quantitative method), question and test implementation… Everything that makes research interesting, captivating, and of course, complicated. 

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THEME 3 - Post-Posting - Research and Theory

Most people would agree human progress is highly dependent on our ability to bring up new theories. Science for example has made great progress during the Industrial Revolution thanks to the numerous discoveries that brought scientists to build new theories, to reinforce old ones, and to create innovative products based on these theories they proposed. 

In a world where paradigm shifts, as Thomas Kuhn describes, have occurred more than once, what happens when we realize a natural phenomenon happening in contradiction with a commonly accepted theory? Does that mean we have to discard completely this theory? Build a new one based on our new observations? What actually makes a theory? 

This week, after reading the articles and explaining one based on what I had learnt, I believed I had grasped the most important notions of the "Research and Theory" theme, without really having had the opportunity to go deeper. The lecture and the seminar gave me this opportunity, and cleared up a few points I had misunderstood. 

To me, a theory was always "true", until someone proved it wasn't. In this sense, my concept of truth differed from the original meaning of the word "truth" - for there to be "truth", we have to be able to consider, as talked about in earlier themes, the world in "God's Point of View", which is factually impossible. Thus, I realized it was better not to use the word "true" or "wrong" to explain what I meant - rather, I'd say a theory is commonly accepted, until someone proposes another take, another contradiction, something that can change our view on that theory. 

Now, I wrote earlier in my Pre-Posting that "theory isn't to be reduced to references, data, lists of variables, diagrams or hypotheses - even if they are part of a system scientists often use for their research. What makes a theory is the added value to these ingredients : the recipe that causally links them in relation to a question it answers. In short, theory has to answer the question of "why", and in that sense further the understanding of the reader in that subject". My stand on this question didn't really change since last Friday, but I can add a few details to make it clearer. Very often, scientists issue a hypothesis: independently from where they got it (from observation, most likely), or how they're going to explain it (by causally linking data, references, etc.), a hypothesis is basically a statement that describes the relationship between entities. Theory has to explain this relationship, to answer the question of why this phenomenon occurs. For example, in Newton's case, a hypothesis would be "if I let go of this pencil, I think it's going to fall.", while his theory explains the relationship between the object we're letting go of and the center of the earth, based on a causal reflexion built on previous theories and data. 

It's also important to realize that we're always working within a specific framework, a specific context. We can then formulate our current paradigms based on previous theories we've commonly accepted… That is, until our whole scientific community has to undergo another paradigm shift. 

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THEME 2 - Post-Posting - Critical Media Studies

B. Post-posting 

Nominalism can be dangerous, especially because it's contributing to the inability to hear the yet unheard.

When discovering the first chapter to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, I didn't think of investigating the cultural and historical background in which this text was born. What a mistake it was.
Thankfully, on monday's lecture, we took the time to paint the whole picture, and I realized then how it sometimes can change your understanding of an essay. 

Escaping from an at-war Germany, to a country they believed represented freedom and culture, Adorno and Horkheimer soon became disillusioned : in a society ruled by consumption and social order, they realized the Enlightenment, or so they decided to call it, wasn't a way towards freedom, far from it actually. 
By trying to demistify the world, mankind focused on observable repetitive phenomena they previously explained by Myths and superstition, to escape their fear of the unknown. But this only served as a bait to distance themselves from Nature, make them appear as rulers of Nature, when actually they couldn't even intervene in those patterns because they, themselves, were products of Nature - made of molecules, and particules... In this sense, they're "programmed" by Nature for everything : there's no free will whatsoever, and everything is just a result of mimesis. Again, by participating in this natural chain of reaction, mankind's fate intertwined again with Myth, after having so desperately tried to free themselves from it with the Enlightenment. 

But what really is the point behind Adorno and Horkheimer's essay ? Why the interest in the Enlightenment? 

To understand that, we have to explain more precisely the concept of Nominalism, inherently the most central argument of the Enlightement: In contrast with Realism, which believes in a conceptual and unbiased world ("God's point of view", like in Theme 1) and is related to analytic judgement, Nominalism focuses on a world as perceived through experience. In a nominalist point of view, each object is unique, with its own set of particularities and characteristics, and is tied to the concept it exemplifies only by a single fragile thread. To link this with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the outside world would be the world in Realism, made of "pure" concepts, where such a thing as a "perfect chair" would exist, while the world in the mirror would be the world of flawed copies. For a nominalist person, the outside world doesn't make sense, concepts and abstract ideas do not exist : unity is the one thing ruling the world. In that sense, all deity and mystical figures are out of the question, and because of that, Nominalism is the core concept in the Enlightenment.  

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, this is the one thing that's most dangerous in the Enlightement: indeed, Nominalism states the obvious facts. It's built on observation, just like the Enlightenment - and leads us to just reproduce a mirror of what already exists... In this sense, no real change could be possible. Take Fascism for example: from a fascist point of view, there is such a thing as natural hierarchical order, where some people are born to be masters whereas others are born to be slaves. If we address this view with Nominalism, you'd see this pattern, reproduce it, repeat what's already done. There's no escaping, since concepts like universal human rights wouldn't exist. You'd be unable to hear the yet unheard. 

By condemning Nominalism and the Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer are denouncing both Fascism and the ever developping consumer's society in the USA, where people fest on culture as if it were a way to freedom, while they argue it's nothing but another way to chain people down. Indeed, culture in mass media tended to reflect the way the world was built - as in the Enlightenment and Nominalism. By depicting the world, with ordinary people doing ordinary work, mass culture was responsible for making people repeat the same gesture over and over again, and did nothing else than just show the social situation as it was then. It didn't give us conditions to change it, rather, it even glorified the situation, according to Adorno and Horkheimer ! 

Movies portray life as it is now, a mimesis reaction again, instead of picturing something we can strive towards. 

In that sense, Adorno and Horkheimer's take on mass media diverges from Benjamin's own point of view. Indeed, based on Cubism, the new media culture had, according to Benjamin, revolutionary potentials: by changing our way to view the world with fragmentation, it could change our role in the society as well ! Movies depicted ordinary people, and every worker had the right to claim he could be in a movies: by doing so, Benjamin argued that mass culture media gave dignity to ordinary folks. 
Nonetheless, they all agreed on how dangerous the use of Art in Fascism was, given that it beautified politics using Art. 

After the seminar and the lecture, my understanding of the texts shifted a bit, and I'm glad we had so many opportunities to get a clearer view of difficult points by sharing our opinions with others and seeing what they themselves felt about the issue. 

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THEME 1 - Post-Posting - Theory of knowledge and theory of science

"Let us assume that our faculties of knowledge do not conform to the objects, but the objects do conform to our faculties of knowledge." 

What does Kant mean by faculties of knowledge? And how do objects conform to them? 

To wholly grasp the Kantian argument, we have to go back to what happened on Monday's lecture. Still a little confused, even after writing my pre-posting and reflecting for a whole week on Kant's writing, I attended the lecture with a clouded mind. 

After being reintroduced to the concepts of analytic and synthetic judgements; with examples that made it easier for us to understand ("All bodies have extension"), and a clarification on what Kant calls his Table of Categories or his forms of intuition, I think I was able to further my understanding on his stand towards metaphysics, while reformulating a question I raised quite awkwardly in my previous blog post : Rather than saying "Can there be knowledge without experience?", the big question seems to go a little more like this… 

How is it possible to generate synthetic knowledge about the world, a priori?

Following this question, Kant opens a whole new chapter of philosophy for mankind to reflect on: gone is the seemingly self-evident conception of knowledge that we had before where we thought we acquired understanding just by opening up to the "world in itself", which, by the way, doesn't make sense according to Kant. Indeed, it refers to "God's point of view", as if there were a way of analyzing the universe from an entirely unbiased observer, without the analysis being tainted by any presupposition, and thus enabling the acquisition of pure knowledge. The problem is that humans are bodily localized, with a perspective, a bias making it impossible to elevate ourselves and our thoughts, forming boundaries that can't be transcended. In this sense, talking about the "world in itself" grounds us in an incoherent conception of knowledge and of the world, that Kant is trying to get rid of. 

Post-Kantian knowledge theory is based on presupposition, where a posteriori knowledge is structured by a priori knowledge, with Kant's Table of Categories.

One logical question that follows this argument is wether or not our knowledge of these twelve categories was based on a posteriori knowledge. During the seminars, we discussed this issue in a four-person group, after which we talked about it with the rest of the class: while this question sure wasn't Kant's point (he was more after how knowledge was structured rather than how to come up with the structure), the fact that the categories he exposed were somehow very basic categories in the sense that it didn't encompass concepts very difficult to grasp (high-level categories such as race, social group…) was pointed out. We don't have to learn these concepts as a cultural fact, or linked to any linguistic approach: the notion of space and time comes inherently to each person, wether or not it is instilled by the current means of transportation or technological environment. It comes naturally, and transcend cultural fact. These categories are a priori, in relation to what they make possible.  

The lecture combined with the seminar made Kant's argument appear that much clearer to me, and after a week of wondering or pondering, I was finally able to read Kant's preface again without having doubts  on whether or not my understanding of the text was correct. 

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