Digital Literacy Through Design : Self-explanatory Devices by Use of Form

Abstract: Everyday technology is easier than ever to use and harder than ever to misuse, for this, we can attribute credits to how user friendly and error-proof minimal and autonomous artefacts are today. However, this puts a significant distance between users and the inner workings of their artefacts, the artefacts have become almost completely opaque black boxes. Users do not know how their artefacts function, and if something breaks, they want to modify them, or they have a need to create something of their own, they do not know how or where to start. This thesis project explores how you might, through the use of design, change user’s attitudes towards tinkering with their technology, by finding out how to make artefacts that can teach about themselves and how they function when being used. The thesis identifies three major factors to take into consideration when designing an artefact with the intention to achieve this. Designers can leverage people’s general preference to teleological explanations, and an artefact’s ability to tell a narrative, to help users create a mental model that reflects the actual events that make the artefact function. Designers can leverage how users use visual clues to make sense of an object and how it interacts with other objects. And designers can also leverage how users often create a metaphorical chain of steps to break down a big process into smaller ones.