Comments on: Designing for Appropriation

By: Alan’s blog » tales from/for Berlin - appropriation, adoption and physicality

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 13:26:26 +0000

[...] The appropriation part of the talk was largely based on my HCI2007 short paper “designing for appropriation“. See also blogs about the topic by Palojono and Dan Perkel. [...]

By: nowuseit.com | links for 2006-08-16

nowuseit.com | links for 2006-08-16 — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 08:18:37 +0000

[...] » Designing for Appropriation Is it possible to design for appropriation and unintended uses? If so, how? If not, why not? (tags: design appropriation hackability usability innovation process) [...]

By: Anarchitect

Anarchitect — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 00:38:06 +0000

Appropriable artifacts…

In Designing for Appropriation Dan Perkel sums up a discussion at the Berkeley school of information about the misuse of artifacts in a sense that people use them in a different way than the creators had ever anticipated. He argues that users need to …

By: Linda

Linda — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 02:01:08 +0000

I missed the discussion on this, unfortunately, but what came to mind from my own perspective (social psychology) were some thoughts I’ve been having about my qualifying exam topics.

For example, research on persuasion has been used in many different ways. I’ve been thinking about which topics, if brought out to the world, could have a positive impact (from my perspective but maybe one point of this discussion is that it’s sure hard to know where something will be taken.

In a more physical way, atomic/nuclear research and genetics could fit in this discussion too. Whenever someone develops basic knowledge in a domain, the future trajectory of the work is unknown.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 23:56:40 +0000

According to IBM’s annual report, “collaboration and co-creation” is one of the key “innovation enablers” for the near future. They cite Eric von Hippel’s book Democratizing Innovation as saying that as many as 40% of a company’s customers modify or tinker with its products in some way.

Has anyone read Hippel’s book?

By: Jono

Jono — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 17:10:35 +0000

Thanks for the write-up Dan. It reminded me of a number of important points I'd forgotten from the discussion. I wrote up some reflections on the design and appropriation from the discussion also (and here concerning innovation and appropriation). In particular, we considered how this fitted with traditional notions of innovation. We (Divya and I) thought their was an interesting distinction of innovation by who. But at the end of the day does it matter for the designer if someone innovates with your design - is this the sign of a more successful design or a mistake? take the Roland 808. I think one of the important lessons, with most of these things is just to extend our traditional notion of when the development and design period ends to well after the design is introduced. As long as you're watching and listening to what people are using your design for you can be quick to react and support it. I remember Danah talking about the design of mySpace following this model of putting something unfinished out, watching what happens, and being ready to remove it and move on or see the success and be ready to support it further.