Appropriation by unanticipated users

Abstract

Research in CSCW has demonstrated that people use technology in inventive ways, yet little work investigates the adoption and adaptation of collaborative technologies by unanticipated users. In this paper, we present a study investigating an unanticipated user group's appropriation of a leaning management system, CTools. This group of users, staff at a large research university, has adapted the system, which was designed to support student-content-faculty interactions at the University of Michigan. We present the User/Use Technology Appropriation Matrix (UTAM) as a way to frame our understanding of users and their system use. Based on findings from system log data and surveys, we show that staff use the system similarly to students and faculty, though they value the tools and work affordances differently in their varied work contexts. We discuss these findings, how UTAM can be used to frame these findings, and suggestions for future research.

Beyond Checklist Approaches to Ethics in Design

“…These efforts view practices related to technology production as sites of intervention to promote, protect, or embed ethics and social values. The range of social values at stake range from concerns about privacy and fairness in data collection and use, to the potential harms of algorithmic categorization and decision making, to the potential for platforms to enable action based on racial biases or spread misinformation, to manipulation of users' behavior using data or designed dark patterns, to corporate contracts with militaries and governments perpetuating harms, and the need for greater diversity and inclusion within technology companies' workforces (e.g., [10,13,16,20,22,24]). The location of the ethics problem varies across these concerns, for instance some being concerned about the technical products themselves, some focusing on the ways in which technologies are used, and others focusing on the people and organizations creating technical artifacts.…”

Playing during a crisis: The impact of commercial video games on the reconfiguration of people’s life during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…They adopted "ready-to-use" technologies to rework their everyday practices and experiences during the lockdown, tailoring their use to their emergent needs as the situation evolved. This process of appropriation (Dourish, 2003;Lally, 2002) refers to the users' ability to adapt the use of technologies to the changing contexts, in ways that were not foreseen in their original designs (Quinones et al, 2013). As we have seen in the background section, most HCI research on video games and crises was addressed to develop novel designs for ameliorating disaster response (Chittaro & Sioni, 2015) or for supporting resilience and psychological recovering of people hit by the disaster (e.g., Ji & Nishino, 2020;Haqq & McCrickard, 2020).…”

Producing Liveness

“…Previous research has explored appropriation, considering how users appropriate technologies during practice [35,18] in order to bridge the sociotechnical gap between design and use [11] and to better support the situatedness, dynamics and ownership of technologies [16]. Robinson [41] and then Pekkola [37] considered how to design technologies for appropriation, identifying factors such as predictability, peripheral awareness, implicit communication, and supporting discussion and negotiation while Quinones and colleagues further extended this perspective to consider design for unexpected users [39]. However, appropriation may be a two-way street, in which appropriated technologies in turn shape the practice, potentially in unanticipated ways.…”