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What cognitive science has to offer for research on appropriation and end-user development

What cognitive science has to offer for research on appropriation and end-user development. Antti Salovaara Ubiquitous Interaction research group Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT Finland. Design as a science. Scientific practice: Requires theory-building

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What cognitive science has to offer for research on appropriation and end-user development

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  1. What cognitive science has to offer for research on appropriation and end-user development Antti Salovaara Ubiquitous Interaction research group Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT Finland

  2. Design as a science • Scientific practice: • Requires theory-building • Requires studies on how theories manifest themselves in the real world • Translation to HCI context: • Creating theories of good design • Studying how different designs are actually used by their users • Observation studies to validate the design theories

  3. Meta-design and appropriation • Meta-design: • User as a designer, programmer or a customizer • Design at design time and use time • Appropriation: • Refers to the evolution of new purposes of use: • Exploration and sense-making of the artifact’s functionalities • Artifact’s incorporation into daily activities • Artifact’s functionalities as such may not always change (cf. meta-design and EUD) • Knowledge about appropriation would contribute to developing meta-design theories

  4. Appropriation: previous research • Studies carried out mostly within sociology and CSCW: • Importance of people who promote and invent new uses • Dependence on a successful worker-manager dialogue • Appropriation tends to proceed in a step-wise manner • Users do not often follow “rules” that designers have built into the systems • How about studies on the cognitive level?

  5. Opportunities for research • Perception and action: • Representations of artifact and their effect on cognition and action • Development of representations (Neisser, 1976)

  6. Opportunities for research (cont’d) • Mental models: • “How do the systems work on a functional level?” • Research focused on people’s concepts of world dynamics • No studies yet on “What can the system used for?” • Learning: • Appropriation is learning: most representational changes can be understood as events of learning • Research could learn from studies on experiental learning and self-directed learning

  7. Opportunities for research (cont’d) • Creativity and insight: • What are the steps in an individual’s processes when s/he discovers a new use? • What factors contribute (in environment, context, thinking style, perception) to creative findings?

  8. Discussion • Appropriation is a relevant research topic for EUD researchers • But also for cognitive science and ecological psychology • Appropriation from a cognitive perspective is an uncharted research territory • A lot to be gained for a bold researcher! • The presented approaches have already a history of methods and theory development • EUD and appropriation researchers should make use of it • This would provide a firm basis to the science of design

  9. Antti Salovaara antti.salovaara@hiit.fi

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