Edinburgh Napier University

  This thesis is concerned with the fact that people routinely appropriate interactive technology. Much of the work in this project was conducted at The Public, an interactive art gallery in West Bromwich. Examples of appropriation that are presented range from interactive art, the game Minecraft™, to mundane objects
encountered in daily life.
Research Questions posed in this study are:
• What are the dynamics of appropriation?
• What is the relationship of appropriation to affordance?
• How do individuals experience appropriation?
Appropriation is the mechanism by which we make objects in the world relevant and personal. This PhD has revealed three dimensions of appropriation namely:
• Control: both in terms of ownership and virtuosity.
• Ensoulment: the mechanism through which we ascribe personal significance to artefacts.
• Affordance: the experiential relationship to artefacts concerned with action on and with them.
Appropriation is revealed as a mechanism through which people understand potential action with technology. A traditional view is that people learn how to use a system and once its canonical use is established new uses or appropriations are discovered.
What is revealed in this study is that appropriation is bound to our perception of action with technology, commonly explained through the concept of affordance. Appropriation is revealed as the initial act in human encounters with technology.