Indirect Manipulation

Things seem to be settling down on the hosting front, so for now we’re back in business. Aren’t you glad.

One important lesson I learned from 2007 is the value of the unintended consequence – something good that arrives from a situation or event that doesn’t work out as hoped or planned. It’s a painful process at times, but upon reflection a greater benefit can sometimes be acknowledged. The folks at Boxes and Arrows have assembled a little collection of thoughts titled Our Way: The Ingenuity of Unintended Uses, and it’s well worth your time:

Just consider the trash can propping open a door or that stack of books holding up the end of a broken shelf or the refrigerator door used as a bulletin board for the family. Examples of unintended use are all around us. I’ve even heard of double bass players using their large, soft-shell instrument cases to nap in between rehearsals like sleeping bag. Odd!

Improvising and re-purposing the objects around us is common. In the ethnographic research for my company, we try to focus on is unintended use. Where do people find work-arounds to the tools and software they normally use? Where do people find hacks? The answers to these questions often point to places where a system breaks down, where people need a better mouse trap. And this is where there is potential opportunity for innovation and where product developers can bring real value to their users.

I love this approach, since it seeks to establish a strongly acute empathy with users. One of my goals for 2008 is to gain a better comprehension of various pain points in design solutions — where I’ve gone wrong in my assumptions and how to offer a more proactive benefit. Expect much of this blog in the coming months to humbly investigate these scenarios, along with riveting accounts of my sundry failings. Failure is good, so I’ve read.

Go back to the Indirect Manipulation home page.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 10:13 am and is filed under Idiomatic Behavior, Life and How to Live It, The Pedagogic Vector. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.