Non-finito products

Abstract

Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. However, what if unfinished ideas actually worked? This dissertation proposes a new design concept, non-finito products, for the HCI design community. This new concept is about how intentionally unfinished products foster creative use by everyday people in actual situations for the enhancement of personal user experience. 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 user creativity in the actual use of products. In addition, the everydayness of computing technology was emphasized through research on creative user experience. Everyone and everyday activities should be supported in terms of creative user experience. This dissertation begins with the construction of non-finito products as a strong concept for the creative user experience with everyday digital products. Theoretical and multi-case studies were applied for constructing the concept. Then, the design patterns of non-finito products were empirically developed. In detail, 177 design instances of non-finito products were collected and analyzed. Thematic analyses, typological analyses, and surveys were applied to discover and examine the design patterns. As a result, the concept of non-finito products

the design principles for the non-finito products

and the three types of non-finito products, i.e., unconcluded, fragmented, and sketched products, including their design patterns, are presented. Non-finito products will open a new design space in HCI and prompt a new means to replace value-destroying complexity with a value-creating version. Non-finito products will help design researchers and practitioners overcome the conventional design rule of envisioning and anticipating the potential uses for identifiable users and specific use contexts. Non-finito products will help people tailor a product to better suit their everyday lives.