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Designing for Appropriation

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Abstract:
Understanding software appropriation is crucial to design software that users adopt and use efficiently. In this talk, I will present four proposals: a general perspective for software appropriation, a theoretical account, a conceptualization of designing for appropriation, and some implications for design. These proposals are based on a holistic perspective including artifact mediation (how software acts as a mediator of users’ activities and how users develop instruments), ecologies of artifacts (taking into consideration that users use multiple artifacts), collective and work practice aspects, and technical and software engineering aspects (different forms of and approaches to software adaptation by users). This perspective leads to an understanding that software appropriation is related to how users consider software as a mediator of their activity and turn it into an instrument for themselves based on the functional values they attribute to it. The reference research paper underlying this presentation may be downloaded from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07370024.2016.1203263

Bio
Pierre Tchounikine (http://lig-membres.imag.fr/tchounikine/) is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Grenoble (LIG lab. ; France). His original research focus is on Learning Sciences (design and usage of technologies for education), in particular Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. His work in Learning Sciences led him to consider as a core issue the fact that software (used by learners and teachers) should be flexible; that the fundamental reason why software should be flexible is related to appropriation phenomena; and that appropriation is, more generally, a fundamental issue of the design of software meant to support human activity.