Wikiuse

This research reconceives everyday design as a creative process where individuals repurpose artifacts within specific contexts, proposing its value as a foundational design resource. By deploying Wikiuse, a mobile sharing platform, the study collected 245 instances of artifact appropriation from dormitory residents to investigate how professional designers utilize such data. Comparative experiments between designers provided with everyday design cases versus those with related product cases revealed that the former group engaged in a distinctive "interaction-oriented process". This approach shifts the focus from existing products to artifact-interaction pairs, allowing designers to recognize and adopt non-intrusive, unremarkable everyday actions into new design solutions. Findings demonstrate that everyday design cases facilitate deep immersion into actual contexts, enabling designers to reach solutions through action-artifact analogies without the need for extensive contextual modeling. Ultimately, this study advocates for an expanded design continuum that integrates spontaneous user adaptations into professional design practice to foster more harmonious human-artifact relationships.