Research Through Design in Sport Science

Send article

Subscribe

Facebook

The research team behind the iSport project is using research through design as a way of creating sophisticated interactive sports equipment. But practising designers may also use the method to uncover new knowledge and potentials through experimentation in their particular practice field, says Martin Ludvigsen, Aarhus School of Architecture, who heads the iSport project.

By Hans Emborg Bünemann

In practice-based design research, the creation of tangible artefacts is part of the research process. First, a tangible object is created, based on a hypothesis; next, the object’s properties are assessed to test whether the hypothesis is borne out. This research method is called research through design; it is not only used in design research but also in other scientific fields as a means of developing new knowledge through physical experiments. In collaboration with the private research institute the Alexandra Institute and with computer scientists and sport scientists from Aarhus University, Martin Ludvigsen, a design researcher at the Aarhus School of Architecture, uses the method to develop interactive sports equipment that can make top athletes’ training more efficient and specifically targeted. This interdisciplinary research project is titled iSport and is funded by the research fund ISIS2 as well as a number of partner companies.

Creating One’s Own Research Object

Martin Ludvigsen explains that despite their different backgrounds, his collaboration with the computer scientists is characterised by springing from a common base. Design research and computer science are both constructive sciences, which construct their own research objects when they base their approach on research through design.
Constructive scientific work is used in many scientific areas. In order to explain the method, Martin Ludvigsen draws a parallel to historians studying the Viking era who hypothesise that a Viking ship may have been constructed in a particular way.
“How do we know what a Viking ship looks like? As relics from the Viking era we have 1000-year-old bits of plank that were unearthed underneath an inlet. Based on these bits and a theory about the Vikings’ method of ship-building, inquisitive historians constructed an actual ship. Thus, in order to falsify – or verify – their hypothesis, the researchers used the ship as a research object in an attempt to answer the question ‘Might the Vikings have used this approach to build their ships?’,” says Martin Ludvigsen. “The only difference between historians and designers is that the historians want to learn about the past, while we’re trying to learn about the future.”

Bodystorming. Two participants in the iSport project are using bodystorming to test an idea for a training instrument consisting of four pillars and a virtual ball. Illustration: Rune Veerasawmy

Research Through Design – Also in Design Practice

The researchers and companies involved in the iSport project have set out to discover whether new technology can be used to develop training equipment that provides an entirely new approach to targeted training for top athletes. Here, research through design is an obvious choice for drawing up and testing future scenarios, says Martin Ludvigsen.
“Design is essentially about the future. With research through design, designers can explore a topic through experimental approaches. These may include, for example, techniques for producing prototypes or bodystorming, a parallel to brainstorming, where the participants use their bodies to develop and test new ideas. Designers use these methods to develop future products, which they can study in turn to discover how they work, and how the world responds to them,” he says.

Thus, research through design is a method that tells designers how they can use material experiments to engage in practice-based research – a way of acquiring knowledge and uncovering potentials in a particular practice field.

Interactive Sports Equipment

As for the specific endeavour of developing sports equipment, Martin Ludvigsen explains that the goal of the iSport project is to combine the intelligence of the human body with new technological possibilities. With this joint emphasis on technology and human physical activity the project hopes to bring technologies that are usually tied to PC mouse clicks into a spatial context. As an example he points to Ph.D. scholar Maiken Fogtmann, Aarhus School of Architecture, whose project is embedded in iSport. In her studies of possible ways of using the entire body as an interactive tool, Maiken Fogtmann looks at top athletes’ training as well as children, play and learning.

One of the flagship components of the iSport project aims to make it possible to develop more complex skills than top athletes are able to in their current training. Martin Ludvigsen explains that during training, athletes are typically focused on testing and analysing their abilities in areas that can be measured, for example in kilograms or seconds.
“Our interdisciplinary team has developed a sort of practice field for two handball players, where they can practice their ability to read each other’s body language and react as fast as possible on this impulse,” he explains. 

Advanced training. The iSport project is developing an interactive training system consisting of four pillars, called the TacTower. The pillars form light signals that reflect the handball players’ movements. This system would enable the players to practice the direct physical interaction which they have otherwise only been able to practice in actual game situations. Illustration: Majken Rasmussen

It is a challenge for the elite sports environment to abandon the precise measurements of athletes’ individual progress during training. But according to Martin Ludvigsen, the researchers rely on user involvement to make sure that the project remains meaningful for the users, both the athletes and their coaches. User involvement is an aspect of the project’s emphasis on the design process as the research methodology.
“Thanks to the method of research through design, I am able to approach the research process as a practising designer, letting the outcomes of the design process affect the research process,” says Martin Ludvigsen.
“As I see it, the method offers a great way of linking research with our normal work method as designers – integrating practice-based aspects with the theoretical and knowledge-building work that is currently underway in the industry.” 

Additional information about TacTower

Christine Jürgensen and Majken Kirkegård Rasmussen. TacTower. Designing Physical Co-Located Multiplayer Interaction. In: Proceedings of SIDeR ’09, April 15-17. 2009. Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. URL:  http://www.flirtingwiththefuture.com/proceedings/tactower/7-TacTower.pdf