Designing for appropriation

By Alan John Dix. British Computer Society Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2007

404 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ethnographies often show that users appropriate and adapt technology in ways never envisaged by the designers, or even deliberately subverting the designers' intentions. As design can never be complete, such appropriation is regarded as an important and positive phenomenon. However designing for appropriation is often seen as an oxymoron; it appears impossible to design for the unexpected. In this paper we present some guidelines for appropriation based on our own experience and published literature and demonstrate their use in two case studies. You may not be able to design for the unexpected, but you can design to allow the unexpected.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c41dfd6f69311e647e9a25018b7b0c918509b4b8

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Citations in the corpus

How Data Science Workers Work with Data: Discovery, Capture, Curation, Design, Creation (2019, background): “Craft-workers make creative use of their tools (similarly to [71]), appropriating them for new purposes, and boot-strapping intermediate tools in order to prepare a task-required tool ([60]; see also [15], [23]).”
Repurposing Citizen Science Games as Software Tools for Professional Scientists (2018, background): “More broadly, previous work has also examined the (re)appro-priation of digital artifacts [4, 12], where users adapt software in ways designers did not intend.”
Characterising the inventive appropriation of emoji as relationally meaningful in mediated close personal relationships (2015, unknown): “We define appropriation as usage that lies beyond a designer's original intent (Dix, 2007).”