Designing an expert system for non-expert users in oral health: Story of a hybrid design research

Abstract

The subject of this thesis is the research, development, and design process of an expert system that I designed for non-experts in the field of pediatric oral health, which started as an enterprise project and later received the TÜBİTAK 1512 Techno-initiative Capital Support Program grant. In this thesis, you will read about the maturation of my idea that I created as a dentist, its transformation into a mobile application prototype within the scope of the TÜBİTAK project, the testing processes, the difficulties encountered, and how I tried to overcome them. In empirical research, the independence of the researcher and the notion that examines the subject from an outsider's perspective are very important. I, on the other hand, was the leading actor in the three-year enterprise story that I addressed as a researcher in this thesis. At every stage of the product from an idea to a prototype; I spent a lot of time applying to institutions, developing the algorithm, and designing the interfaces and the system. For these reasons, I did not want to write down the research I conducted in the process as if I were an observer. Because that would be quite wrong. Thus, the complexity of the process and my inseparable relationship with the product led to the need to adopt a hybrid approach to the subject. In my approach, I combined the three forms of design research that Frayling described. The "Research through Design" approach allowed me the freedom to convey what I experienced in the process from my perspective, without skipping any steps. Since it is not possible to generalize about entrepreneurship based on my own story, there could not be a more appropriate method in which I would be involved as a subject. The research I conducted to enable non-expert users to use an expert system was exactly in line with the "Research for Design" approach. Because at the end of the day, my goal was to improve the product. The "Research into design" approach enabled me to document data that emerged independently of the product I designed and could contribute to the literature. I am aware that in this approach I have adopted, a portrayal of dissociative identity emerges. I became a "Research through Design" researcher while describing my process, a designer when researching to improve the product, and sometimes a design researcher who intends to contribute to the literature. A researcher can wear these hats in different periods. I wore all these hats during one study. Therefore, in this thesis, you will witness hybridity just like my process. This thesis touches on more than one area. Therefore, what I have told can be evaluated from many different angles. It can be considered as the process of developing an entrepreneur's product, the place of digital products in the field of oral health, a critique of the way dentists handle these products in the literature, the difficulties in developing a medical device, designing of artificial intelligence and human interaction, the effort to bring an expert system closer to the non-expert user, the design's role in all these aspects or as a different method attempt at design.