Strange Shapes and Unexpected Forms: New Technologies, Innovative Interfaces, and Design-in-Use

Abstract

After almost three decades, user-centered design (UCD) has become a common practice for designers, not only to solve problems, but also to serve the prospective users—people who are most affected by designs. Despite its successes and virtues, we have arrived at an appropriate time to reassess this approach. In UCD, the crucial aspects are to represent users and to anticipate their understanding of new artifacts. The aim is to properly communicate the “script” of proper use to the users.1 But results from user studies apply only to existing situations.2 Original yet unfamiliar design proposals are more likely to be ruled out in a UCD process,3 and deviation in use is considered undesirable instead of an opportunity for new designs. In general, UCD overlooks the fact that new use practices evolve with new artifacts and that people can and do adopt, appropriate, and reuse them. To overcome the limitations of UCD, participatory design (PD) practitioners have therefore proposed an “infrastructuring” approach to design, to account for modifications during use.4 Where anticipation and representation are limited, design and use should overlap to cope with evolving use behavior. As in the “thoughtless acts”5 of everyday reuse—also labeled “non-intentional design” (NID),6 “appropriation,”7 or “design-in-use,”8— designer and user are in the best-case scenario recognized as identical. Recently, PD practitioners have found common ground with critical design (CD) in their shared interest of investigating the ethical and social implications of new technologies through the mediation of material artifacts.9 While PD remains committed to realistic compromises, CD uses artifacts as narrative props to evoke unpredictable reactions as a goal.10 UCD, PD, CD, and NID can be understood as four different ways to deal with design-in-use. The basic design phases of analysis, variation, and selection11 correspond and are sometimes identical with the use phases of adoption, appropriation, and reuse.12 1 B. Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artefacts,” in Shaping Technology/ Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Wiebe Bijker and John Law, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 225–58. 2 This dilemma has been called the “applicability gap.” 3 Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton, “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time),” in Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy: ACM, 2008), 111-20. 4 Pelle Ehn, “Participation in Design Things,” in 10th Participatory Design Conference (Bloomington, IN: ACM, 2008), 92-101. 5 Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO, Thoughtless Acts? (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005). 6 Uta Brandes, “Non-Intentional Design,” in Design Dictionary. Perspectives on Design Terminology, Michael Erlhoff and Tim Marshall, ed. (Basel: Birkhauser, 2008), 270-71. 7 Alan Dix, “Designing for Appropriation,” in 21st BCS HCI Group Conference (Lancaster, UK: British Computer Society, 2007), 27-30; Paul Dourish, “The Appropriation of Interactive Technologies: Some Lessons from Placeless Documents,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work 12, no. 4 (2003), 465–90. 8 Austin Henderson and Morten Kyng, “There’s No Place Like Home: Continuing Design in Use,” in Design at Work, Joan Greenbaum and Morten Kyng, ed. (Boca Raton, London, New York: CRC Press, 1991), 219-40.