2011 - 2017

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.