Non-finito products: a new design space of user creativity for personal user experience

Abstract

Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. However, what if unfinished ideas work? This CHI paper proposes a new design space we call non-finito products for the HCI community. This new design space is about intentionally unfinished products and how they foster new creations by end-users as they are actually used to help people solve their own problems. The central idea comes from the background of the growing complexity associated with IT advancement and from the new way of dealing with it, with the assistance of user creativity in the actual use of the products. This paper begins with the exploration of non-finito products as a new design space for the end-user's creativity in the personal user experience. We then defined and proposed non-finito products. We discussed three case studies that will help to understand the design space of non-finito products, and we framed the new design space by revealing the beneficial contexts and values. Finally, we suggested the implications of designing non-finito products. We believe that non-finito products will open a new design space in HCI, prompt a new means of replacing value-destroying complexity with value-creating version, and help to make a product better fit to user experience.