Designing for Unpredictability of Use

"It is Raining Umbrellas!" by Taruna Goel (Underbrella at Bill Curtis Square, Vancouver March 2019)

A few days ago, as I was researching more about the practice of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), I came upon an intriguing idea related to designing for "unpredictability of use". It isn't the first time I have heard it or read about it, but this time around, I approached it with a UDL lens as a way to be more inclusive in the design of learning experiences.

Do you think about the unexpected use(s) of the learning products/ services you create? Do you imagine how your “learning product” may be reused, reshared, or remixed in serendipitous ways? In my effort to learn more about this idea of the unpredictability of use, I ventured into a few compelling reads, and here are some highlights that were uncovered from that exercise:

• "Between specificity and openness: How architects deal with design-use complexities": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X19300869

Liesbeth Stam, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Ann Heylighen, Design Studies, Volume 66, 2020, Pages 54-81, ISSN 0142-694X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2019.11.010 

"Anticipating use entails a continuous testing of solutions between specificity and openness. Seeking a balance, these architects repeatedly ask themselves how open their design can be, such that it can still support specific use practices (e.g., meeting colleagues, recording or editing video's). And vice versa: how specific can they be in imagining use such that different interpretations (e.g., by users or the client) remain possible? These questions are explored continuously. To foster particular social outcomes, architects develop specificity into their designs. To deal with the unpredictability of use architects aim to create open designs.

The more specific the design (focus), the more difficult it is for a building or space to respond to the unexpected and unforeseen – i.e., to diversity of use(r)s as well as changing contexts, e.g., related to social and technological change. So designs need to be specific, yet simultaneously ‘open’."

• "Users as co-designers: Visual–spatial experiences at Whitworth Art Gallery": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095263519300275

Ahlam Ammar Sharif, Frontiers of Architectural Research, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020, Pages 106-118, ISSN 2095-2635, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2019.04.003

"This paper implies that designs and users are co-created by the ways they interact, which means that the success of designs should not be determined by how they align to specific uses but by how they are adaptable to the multiplicity and unpredictability of use. 

Designs could be recreated by uses in different ways, making them more livable. Designs could further uncover new potentials because of the creativity of their usage. In the case of museums, users could be mistakenly expected to interact with an artwork in specific ways.

On the contrary, users bring new potentials to the building while inviting different types of interaction. Accordingly, designs should be adaptive to and flexible for different categories and functions to invite more users and stimulate their creativity with respect to the ways they interact with the building." 

• “Serendipitous Reuse” IEEE-Serendipitous_Reuse.pdf (vinoski.net)

Steve Vinoski, Verivue

Steve opens his article with a powerful quote: “Engineer for serendipity. —Roy Fielding” Taking an enterprise architecture perspective, Steve asks:

"If we’re wise, we never assume that serendipity will come along just in time whenever we need it. So is it really possible, as Fielding suggests, to make a given situation more amenable to serendipity? Is it feasible to arrange the primary elements of an area such as enterprise integration in a way that encourages the "development of beneficial applications that the enterprise architects never dreamed of? 

The more specific the service interface, the less likely it is to be reused, serendipitously or otherwise, because the likelihood that an interface will fit what a client application requires shrinks as the interface’s specificity increases. 

Highly specialized interfaces inhibit general reuse because only purpose-built clients can invoke them. Should requirements change — and they will — modifying such highly specialized services and clients to fulfill the new requirements can be costly because of the high degree of coupling between them."

-.-.-.-.-

All of this is to say that there is an important relationship between design and serendipitous use. Even though we design things based on what we know and what we might imagine happening in the future, it is still a lens that’s based on trying to solve the problems we are facing now. But knowing that the future may not be anything like the present, if we don’t design for serendipitous use and unpredictability, our designs have failed from the get-go.

Needless to say, we can’t plan for all possible uses. But what we can plan for is to create those opportunities and spaces for the unpredictable to happen. Infact, I’d say that designing for unpredictability is a critical part of designing for inclusivity.

Perhaps, as learning designers, we can do more to explore how serendipitous knowledge exchanges happen and how designing for unpredictable use nurtures these kinds of opportunities. We need to think about what can we do to allow, enable and nurture the reuse and repurposing of the “learning experience” in other ways. What kind of systems, processes and techniques can we use that allow folks to customize and personalize the learning experience in ways that they find most meaningful and valuable?

The two key ways I have found I can do this are to:

• involve a range of stakeholders in the design process including the learners, and 
• give learners the choice and voice in exploring and participating in the learning experience by providing a variety of ways to develop skills and competencies in ways that meet their specific interests and needs. This can mean anything from simply unlocking course navigation to more complex choices about what resources to explore and how best to assess their own learning. 

Essentially, when we design for the unpredictability of use, we give back the learners some control of how they want to engage and learn and more importantly, how they want to represent and express what they have learned. 

When Roy Fielding said “Engineer for serendipity", he juxtaposed two very contrasting ideas and did it in a beautiful way. And that’s the balance we need to constantly strive for: designing for and making things specific and at the same time, allowing for and enabling unpredictable and accidental use.