Designing for utilization : putting design principles into practice

Designers do not only create usable products for a predefined purpose, but also to explore new materials and technologies. In doing so, they should not restrict themselves to existing conventions, but develop new ones out of the medium at hand. These new interface forms should encourage users to appropriate an object for their own purposes – i.e. utilize it. In this paper, we will describe the development of a fabric interface prototype that should exploit the material and encourage utilization of the interface. We discuss how our theoretical perspective was translated into a concrete design, and how appropriate we judge it for utilization. We conclude that design without final goal is surprisingly hard to do, but can show the value of the medium used.