Hi Terence
I guess what I am trying to point at is a kind of conflict that may arise
when researching and designing at the same time - the agendas are not always
completely compatible. (Probably there has been much written about this both
here and elsewhere...?) I experienced a specific situation where we had to
make a choice - would we collect more data on an unchanged product (thus
making our data more robust for a research audience) or would we change the
product after achieving what appeared to be the beginning of data saturation
and begin a new set of tests on a changed product (thus getting on with our
design agenda to improve the product).
I don't mean to infer that this kind of process isn't publishable, but the
decision we made to change the product and do a new iteration of tests
seemed a bit foreign to the experienced health researcher we were working
with, who would have preferred to have a large number of units tested in
order to make a more credible argument in an article (for a health research
audience). I might add that this wasn't irrelevent - the success of what we
were working on depended on the approval of a large international audience
who could see that the end product had been thoroughly tested during
development.
I'm rather new in this territory, haven't published anything yet, but will
do within the next year, in health research journals (hopefully). So I am
sensitive to the criteria set in that domain, and how it might differ from
publishing criteria in a design-oriented journal.
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