Secondary research and frameworks
Gesture tech literature review and organizing data
This week our research practice focused on doing secondary research in the 3D gesture technology space. The goal was to do the research, get insights, share them and make sense of it all by using research analysis frameworks.
Our team of three chose to work on this space particularly as we were beginning to get interested in the topic as a potential capstone project. We started with going through a ton of online websites, articles, and academic journals, read papers and created a shared insights and papers sharing space on the tool Mendeley.
As the next step we got to the analysis and synthesis phase of the research process. This is the fun part and possibly the most important, because when we are faced with a ton of information, the question is how do you organize it, analyze it and make sense of it all, to find interesting patterns for further research or design directions.
Research frameworks help with this very effectively. The help us externalize our thoughts. We do this by scribbling off insights, thoughts, ideas and findings on post-its start sharing them with the team, make connections, group them, draw relationships between the data. This is an invaluable way to make secondary research tangible and permanent before all the insights get lost over time. From this we can start to see possible directions to take the concepts further. This also helps get all the team members to collectively synthesize findings and build consensus.
Industry Diagnostics/ Five Forces Framework
We found a lot of information about the industry and wanted to organize that to understand what forces are at play in the gesture and new input technology space. A good framework for this we found was the Industry Diagnostics. Specifically we applied the Five Forces model of Industry Diagnostics to assess the impact of potential entrants, substitutes, buyers, suppliers and competitors. We also added complements because in this industry we see a lot of tech working in dependence of each other.
Trends Matrix
From our literature review we read a lot about the current state of art in the field and new technological advances. To put this in a meaningful way we felt a trends matrix would be a good way to start. trends matrix gave us a high level summary of how trends and forces of change affect the tech, business, people, culture and policy. To further understand how the changes happening in the industry affect we structured this to show former, current and future trends.
What emerged out of this
This was the starting point from where we took this topic further into becoming our capstone project.
But getting started this way helped us start thinking about a few potential primary research questions and topics. The follow up to the findings of this was a complete immersion into more literature reviews, scouring through academic journals, conference publications.
- Where does value come from in industries utilizing 3D gesture technology?
- How has feedback been integrated into 3D gesture technology?
- What AI tech exists to interpret human body language and emotion?
- How could new input hardware better enable this?
- What role will gesture technology play in the experience economy?
- How could 3D gesture technology enable adaptive user interfaces?
- How do ubiquitous computing systems in a built environment utilize gesture technology?
Some questions for experts:
What do you think is the next paradigm of User Interface?
What do you think is the future of 3D gesture interaction systems?
Do you see it mass deployed? If yes, by what time frame? If not, why not?
What todays cutting edge research can bring to current gesture based platforms for providing a better UX?
What do you think is missing?
Where/ In which domains do you see this technology as useful?
