Everyday Design as a Design Resource

Hyangah Kim, Woohun Lee

In the field of design, using artifacts in creative ways other than the ways envisioned by their designers has been regarded as merely a form of “use,” rather than a creative activity in its own right. This study reconceives everyday design as a process by which people create new uses for designed artifacts within given contexts. We enlisted four groups of professional designers into a practical design experiment. Two groups were provided with everyday design cases collected from a sharing application, Wikiuse, while the other two were provided with related design cases. The everyday design cases were found to encourage a design process that is strongly interaction-oriented. An “interaction-oriented process” is a design process that starts with recognition of non-intrusive, everyday actions inherent in everyday design cases, actions that are then incorporated into design solutions. Moreover, professional designers learn how such actions are achieved with everyday artifacts via everyday design cases, which consist of artifact–interaction pairs. Designers can thus reach a design solution by adopting interactions from everyday design cases. This process obviates the need for designers to represent the context of product use in their design processes, as professional designers who utilize everyday design cases are already heavily immersed in the actual context.