Study on design-in-use process through a hackable product

Abstract

As a creative individual, people often use things in a different way that sometimes the usage goes beyond the expectation of its intended use by the designer or the engineer. Such activity of an individual is best made possible within a design frame that allows a certain openness in use

design-in-use. ‘Design-in-use product’ is a product which follows the core meaning of design-in-use which tries to make the best out of the creativity of the user by facilitating the design-in-use behavior

such as appropriation or ad hoc prototyping. One of the biggest reasons of why design-in-use product shows the possibility for the future lies in the advance of digital fabrication. With the introduction of the internet and the popularization of 3d printers and home CNC machines, such ‘files’ can now turn into a real product, bringing whole new possibilities in fabrication. But today, for our mass-production culture, we are in lack of study related to the process of design-in-use and how it could be applied to a product. In this thesis, we detail the motivation, related work, design concept and related user study to find out how users would use design-in-use products in the near future. During the study, we develop a design-in-use product to solve various problems people face in their desk workspace. To understand the iteration process of design-in-use products, study-in-the-wild is carried out for 2 weeks with 3 participants at each of their own workspaces. Through the user evaluation, we have identified user behavior which resulted in the proposal of design considerations for the future design-in-use product as well as implications for the meta-designers. The thesis is concluded with limitations of which the study lack, as well as notifying the opportunities for future research.