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Design for the margins

See also: technology-changes-us

Idea from Agre (1997) which I'm still finding out and thinking about. There is a lot here which resonates with experiences with bad

My current take

  • Technical practice must draw upon schemata/understandings of the world/task of interest which are in turn systematised/implemented by the technological practice
  • As with anyone with a certain schemata of the world, new knowledge of world/task are either ignored or appropriated into/understood as part of the existing schemata (assimilation) - (Piaget and co. probably have something to say on this)
  • Mainly because these are seen as 'central' - easily assimilated and "marginal" (not easily assimilated) cases

Leading to the the technical practice "persistently" failing "to produced reasonable accounts of the phenomena it treats as marginal" (Agre, 1997, p. 45)

Design implications#

Leshed et al (2008) suggest an implication for design is

to innovate by explicitly designing for the margins of technical practices and thereby introducing new metaphors

References#

Agre, P. E. (1997). Metaphor in practice. In Computation and Human Experience (pp. 27--48). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511571169.003

Leshed, G., Velden, T., Rieger, O., Kot, B., & Sengers, P. (2008). In-car gps navigation: Engagement with and disengagement from the environment. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1675--1684. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357316