Research
My motivating interest is the relationship between technology and creativity: how technology can support creative activities and how it evolves to provide new creative opportunities. Exploring these issues has led me to pursue a wide-ranging path of inquiry, calling on computer science, architecture, philosophy, history and theory of design and computational design.
Ultimately, these studies converged on an interest in the ways people adapt and appropriate technology to suit their own purposes and in bricolage in general. In modern French, bricolage refers to a particular range of activities, akin to tinkering or DIY. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) characterizes bricolage as the pre-industrial mindset of a creative individual who acts spontaneously in response to the surrounding environment. For many theorists, bricolage suggests an approach to design that alleviates some of the limitations inherent to more modern approaches (Ciborra 2002, Louridas 2001, Rowe and Koetter 1978). Moreover, understanding how people appropriate technology to suit their own purposes can help designers to create technologies that are more useful (Fischer and Scharff 2000).
My recent work with Andrew Ko involves the various ways people collect, organize and share practical knowledge. Such collections may include manuals, magazines and catalogs; the environments in which we live, work and play; and, increasingly, the places we go online. Currently, I'm investigating the use of online question/answer sites to exchange skills that are most readily gained through practice. Meanwhile, I'm working with Julie Kientz on studies of do-it-yourself activity among individuals with disabilities.
References
- Ciborra, C.U. (2002) The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Fischer, G., Scharff, E. (2000) Meta-Design: Design for Designers. Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Designing Interactive Systems [DIS]. New York: ACM.
- Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Louridas, P.L. (1999) Design as Bricolage: Anthropology Meets Design Thinking. Design Studies 20(6) 517-535.
- Rowe, C., Koetter, F. (1978) Collage City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
