Aspects of Appropriation

This position paper takes “appropriation” as its basic stance towards the issues of evolution of groupware.
What are some of the elements of which appropriation consists?
· Flexibility. Appropriation arises from the ways in which a technology is flexible.
 Flexible has at leasttwo possible meanings here.
Flexibility can arise through control or through openness.
 Flexibility through control means offering ways for people to adjust settings, reprogram the system or otherwise technically adjust it to their own needs. Flexibility through openness means that a system is simply
uncommitted to particular forms of use or content (e.g. in the way that email is not committed to
particular styles of conversation or content).
· Community. Appropriation is a communal activity. It takes place within a community; in fact, specific
uses only become appropriated practices when they are taken up and shared.
· Visibility. Appropriation is a collective phenomenon. In order to share patterns of use and
customisation within a community, their effects have to be visible to others.
· Incrementality. Appropriation is a gradual process; a gradual accumulation of variations in practice and
technology that build on each other over time. As a result, then, technologies that provide for
incremental development lend themselves more easily to this sort of use.
· Persistence. Similarly, since appropriation happens over time, it can happen more easily in systems
which hold their state stably from moment to moment. Persistence allows changes and adaptations to
survive, and in turn (along with visibility and incrementality) to provide the basis for further
appropriation.
Of course, appropriation is not simply a technical phenomenon. The same general process can be seen at
work in the development of working styles and practices, for instance, as new organisational processes are
adapted and arranged to fit local needs. However, in the technical domain, we can begin to see how specific
features of computer systems can either enhance or interfere with the gradual intertwining of technology
and practice that constitutes appropriation and evolutionary use. Any understanding of how evolutionary
use emerges needs, then, to be grounded in understandings of the relationship between design and practice
that these examples begin to uncover.