The thing is: I'm not the target user. The car was designed for active 20-year-old college students who like to camp, surf, have tailgate parties and sex in their vehicles (the Element seats fold down into a bed). Nowhere in the original brochure was a picture of a 30-something designer who hasn't camped in 10 years and whose surfing is limited to the web. Not to mention no pictures of his three-year-old daughter who logs plenty of Element time, being carted to and from pre-school, playgrounds, and summer camp.

It wasn't meant for me, so some features are moderately useless. The sunroof is over the back seat so that you can stand up and change clothes after surfing, for example. Never once have I pealed off a wetsuit while standing up in the back of my car. It's only use is that my daughter likes to look up at the stars and rain from her carseat.

But a weird thing happened with the Element: the target audience wasn't buying it. In a New York Times article, a spokesman for Honda admitted that the average age for Element buyers is 40. And all of a sudden, in this year's advertising, there's decidedly some older-looking folks. Interesting. It's yet another case of the street finding its own uses for things. That plastic floor that's so good for surfers' sandy feet is also good for toddler spills. Folding up the rear seats to fit mountain bikes in is also pretty helpful for trips to IKEA too.

The question that arises is: how can you design for this? Is it possible to design things flexible enough so that they aren't just for their specific tasks, but can also be platforms for other user groups you haven't even thought of to make their own use out of them? The iPod is another excellent example of this: designed for playing music, used for hundreds of other things. My friend Brian Haven did some thinking about this in his master's thesis essay, Designing for Participation and I'm sure I'll get an earful next week at the DIS panel on Designing for Hackability.

Granted, just about anything can be used for a purpose it wasn't designed for. Lethal Weapon 2 taught us a nail gun could be used for killing bad guys. And who hasn't used a screwdriver to pop the cap off a beer bottle? But neither tool was designed to be adapted; they just were out of necessilty.

I'm going to take a stab in the dark here and suggest that in order for something to be creatively misused (or used by a group outside of the target audience), the designers need to have an awareness that the product can be adapted for many different things, most of which they don't know, and (somehow) design for that. Provide built-in tools to build things, but not the things themselves. Build for future extensions that are unclear and ill-defined. Trust that at some point, someone will define them. Embrace uncertainty.

This is a tough thing to do as a designer: relinquish some control to users. This is also going to be a tough sell to corporations: "Why do we need a USB port?" "Because it'll make it extensible." "For what?" "Ummm, I'm not sure yet." "And this is going to cost us how much extra?" But in the long run, it's smart business to do this. Look at Ebay and how it's both a service and a platform that other businesses have built off of.

The time is fast approaching when we'll have several generations of people who have grown up with digital devices (if it isn't already here already). A lot of these people won't simply accept the products that are handed to them blindly; they'll want to participate in their adaptation, customization and even in their creation. Brace yourselves for impact.

Posted at 11:39 AM | comments (2) | trackback (1)