Beyond Designer’s Intentions. A Semiotic Exploration of Technology Interpretation and Appropriation.

Although interactive technologies are always designed to serve specific purposes, it is well-known in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) that these technologies are not always used as their designers intended. Technology use is not a matter of passive reception: through their use, users actively construct and impose new meanings on the technologies they use. Depending on the approach, this phenomenon is referred to as domestication, appropriation, or interpretation of technology (Salovaara 2012).

The “adoption process that changes the ways in which technology is used” (Salovaara, 2012) has been analyzed from a variety of angles, including cognitive science (Salovaara, 2012), design (Dix, 2007; Dourish, 1999) , Information Systems research (Carroll, 2004), and Science and Technology Studies (Akrich & Latour, 1992). Even though the theoretical perspectives above offer a wide variety of insights into e.g. social structures and relevant cognitive processes, individual users’ appropriation is often described in HCI as either fascinating – people are more creative than designers expect – or a failure – the designer has failed to account for people’s real-life practices (Salovaara et al., 2011). Within this literature, the specific role of design and user interfaces in technology appropriation has not been researched in detail. We present a method to research users’ interpretations of technology based on an analysis of the user interface on the one hand, and user interpretation on the other. With this approach, we can determine to what extent interfaces influence appropriation by determining the users’ interpretation.

We frame the relationship between the user interface and the users’ interpretation as a relation between design strategies and user tactics (De Certeau, 1984). On the one hand, designers have specific intentions when designing technology: these intentions are embedded in the design as structural design strategies, such as features and affordances. These strategies aim to suggest or even impose specific interactions on the user: together, they constitute a potential for interactivity embedded in the user interface. On the other hand, the users’ interaction is an actualization of the potential embedded in the system. The user can choose to abide by the strategies embedded in the interface, or develop tactics to circumvent these strategies, and use the technology in unanticipated ways.

This analysis of design strategies and user tactics is situated at the intersection of ethnography and multimodality (Kress, 2011). A multimodal approach is used to analyze the design strategies embedded in technology: we describe how the technology shapes and controls the users’ experience. In addition, ethnographic field study techniques are used to investigate how users actually use the technology, and how they interpret it from their specific point of view. The combination of ethnography and multimodality results in a detailed understanding of the way the design strategies embedded in the technology guide the users, and how users develop specific tactics to resist these design strategies. Furthermore, insight into the users’ tactics and interpretive processes can help interaction designers in designing systems, taking into account the reality of different user interpretations, instead of designing for one definitive interpretation.

References

Akrich, M., Latour, B. (1992) A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Non-Human Assemblies. In: Shaping Technology/Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Bijker, W.E., Law, J. (Eds.), pp. 259--264,  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Carroll, J. (2004) Completing Design in Use: Closing the Appropriation Cycle, In: Proc. ECIS 2004. Paper 44.

De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. London, UK: University of California Press.

Dix, A. (2007). Designing for Appropriation. In: Proc. British HCI 2007, p. 27-30, Swindon, UK: British Computer Society.

Dourish, P. (1999). Evolution in the Adoption and Use of Collaborative Technologies. In: Proc. ECSCW’99 Workshop on Evolving Use of Groupware.

Kress, G. (2011). ‘Partnership in Research’: Multimodality and Ethnography. Qualitative Research 11(3): 239-260.

Salovaara, A., Höök, K., Cheverst, K., Twidale, M., Chalmers, M., Sas, C. (2011) Appropriation and Creative Use: Linking User Studies and Design, In: CHI ’11 EA, pp. 37-40. New York, NY: ACM Press.

Salovaara, A. (2012). Repurposive Appropriation and Creative Technology Use in Human-Computer Interaction. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Helsinki, Finland.