cixd creative interaction design lab.

This research project proposes a new design space we call non-finito products. 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. There is a need for the design of more user-centered, open, or flexible products to meet complex human needs, as a way of overcoming the limitations of the traditional HCI paradigm of designing finished, closed, concluded, and completed products based on the methods of function/feature analysis and focusing on meeting a user’s good mental model. We believe that non-finito products will open a new design space, prompt a new means of replacing value-destroying complexity with value-creating version, and help to make a product better fit to user experience. We should remember that there is a major difference between a completed work and a finite one: completed works are not necessary finite.

• Non-finito Products: A New Design Space of User Creativity for Personal User Experience

  Seok, J., Woo, J., and Lim, Y., “Non-finito Products: A New Design Space of User Creativity for Personal User Experience,” Proceedings of CHI 2014, ACM Press, (Toronto, Canada, April 26-May 1), pp.693-702.

  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.

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