Borderline Issues: Social and Material Aspects of Design

Abstract The shared use of artifacts is, we argue, supported by latent border resources, which lie beyond what is usually recognized as the canonical artifact. These unnoticed resources are developed over time as artifacts are integrated into ongoing practice and stable conventions or genres grow up around them. For a couple of reasons, these resources may now deserve increased attention. First, because they lie outside conventional frames of reference, many new designs and design strategies inadvertently threaten to remove resources on which users rely. Second, because of the increasingly rapid proliferation of new technologies, users have less time to develop new border resources. Consequently, we suggest, designers now need to understand more fully the role border resources play and to work more directly to help users develop them. Meeting these goals will require more than an intensification of user-centered design. It will require a fundamental redirection of the way many designers look at both artifacts and users.