ABSTRACT:
Systems clearly need to be useful and usable on order to do a job for  people and to do it easily. However if a system is wonderfully  designed, fulfills a real need and would be a pleasure to use, it is still no good at all unless it is actually used. This talk will discuss two aspects of getting systems or products actually used:
(1) adoption - managing the path from no users to widespread use;
(2) appropriation - designing systems that users can change to their own purposes.
For the former I will draw on personal experience in (failed!) dot.com companies, analysis of other successful and unsuccessful products and more theoretical analysis.  Many products fail simply because their designers have only considered the end case, how they will eventually be used, but not how they manage the path from no-use to use - the take home message from this part is that getting things used is too important to leave to the marketing people, but needs to be built into the nature of the product.
The latter is perhaps more challenging still designing for appropriation appears to be an oxymoron; it appears impossible to design for the unexpected.  Yet ethnographies often show that users appropriate and adapt technology in ways never envisaged by the designers, or even deliberately subverting the designers' intentions. As design can never be complete, such appropriation is clearly an important and positive phenomenon. In this talk, based on our experience and published literature, I will show that far from an oxymoron there are strategies and guidelines to allow one to design for appropriation and I will demonstrate their use in two case studies. You may not be able to design for the unexpected, but you can design to allow the unexpected.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY:
Alan Dix is Professor of Computing at Lancaster University and a Director of LUBEL, the University's IP management company. As well as working at several universities, he has been an executive director of two Internet companies and is currently on the advisory board for the open- data platform of Talis, one of the UK's leading semantic web companies. His academic roots are in mathematics, but he has worked in Human-Computer Interaction research since 1984, and is the author of one of the principal international textbooks in the area as well as over 300 technical publications and other books. His work typically includes formal or conceptual modelling to derive user interaction understanding or architectural design. Applications of this include collaborative aspects of web and mobile computation, ubiquitous interaction and designing experience. Current projects include DEPtH (Designing for Physicality ) a UK AHRC/EPSRC Designing the 21st Century project, and CASIDE an UK EPSRC project on situated and public displays. His interests are eclectic: formalisation and design, physicality and digitality, the economics of information, structure and creativity, and the modelling of dreams.

SCHEDULE: Monday 11th May, Sala Kessler, 11.00 a.m.

Contact: Silvia Gabrielli