On Coupling By Users, Not Designers

Dourish uses the term “coupling” to describe the way that we choose to act in the world with and through objects. Drawing from phenomenology, he references Martin Heidegger’s concept of ready-at-hand and present-at-hand to point to the different ways that we make relationships with our things. Sometimes we only think of the action that we accomplish through a thing (ready-at-hand or acting through an object), while at other times we need to focus on the thing as a discrete artifact (present-at-hand or acting with an object). Coupling is how we navigate this engagement with objects, moving between acting with and acting through.

Coupling in interactive systems is not simply a matter of mapping a user’s immediate concerns onto the appropriate level of technical description. Coupling is a more complex phenomenon through which, first, users can select, from out of the variety of effective entities offered to them, the ones that are relevant to their immediate activity and second, can put those together in order to effect action. Coupling allows us to revise and reconfigure our relationship toward the world in use, turning it into a set of tools to accomplish different tasks. (p.142)

Coupling is one way we give meaning to things, by building an intentional relationships through use. For Dourish, the fact that coupling occurs only through use is an important detail with an important implication.

While designers might suggest a coupling, they cannot actually make one. Only the user can do that, because coupling only happens in use… Instead of designing ways for the artifact to be used, the designer instead needs to focus on ways for the user to understand the tool and understand how to apply it to each situation. (p.172-173)

Rather than designing scenarios of use, Dourish believes that designers should instead think about the ways an artifact is made available for appropriation by users.

Technological systems need to be adapted to the widely different nature of work process and practice in each setting in which they are used; they must be appropriated and incorporated as a part of a specific set of working practices. In designing software systems, then, we need to be alert to the ways in which systems offer, to their users, the resources that will allow them to adapt and appropriate it. (p.171)

This means building things so that users can choose when something is ready-at-hand or present-at-hand, as appropriate for their situated action.

This is potentially a radical challenge to designers since it questions our role as form-givers or (in the case of interaction design) architects of activity. Dourish isn’t recommending the elimination of the designer, but a change in stance towards the design activity, one that recognizes users as participating actors who will appropriate technology as they need it and not necessarily as you have conceived it. This relates to movements in participatory design as well.