Appropriating Technology

How we use digital technologies and make them our own.

Appropriation is the process by which we turn digital technologies into instruments for our own use. Since we do not use technologies but rather our appropriations of them, understanding why and how these appropriations develop is important and useful for both users and for designers. However, appropriation is an under-explored aspect of human computer interaction. In “Appropriating Technology”, Pierre Tchounikine explains that appropriation is constitutive of how we actually use things in practice and is different in nature from the initial process of learning to use a technology.

He provides an analysis of the phenomena of play; how the way we develop (we evolve, we learn) is key; how our human high-level needs also play an important—though often unconscious—role; how the current adaptation means offered by most technologies give us some degree of freedom to align technologies to our needs and desires (although they are far from fully satisfactory); and how these design aspects may be improved.