Tuesday, April 11, 2006
The medium of end-user involvement
People have been sending me e-mails pertaining to a rather wide areas of end-user involvement in surrounding technologies. The categories range from how people have taken their physical surroundings (urban settings, agricultural environments, etc...) all the way to how users customized their "My Whatever" home page and adapted it to their needs. There also seems to be a great amount of interest in 3D printing technologies in relation to the self-manufacturing mode of things. It's certainly got the "cutting edge technology" character to it. There seem to be a new book coming out in the realm of end-user tailorable software systems as well.
I sense that there's something interesting about the amount of end-user involvement in the various technologies that we're surrounded by. Perhaps it's simply low cost of entry (i.e. skill and/or resources required), or perhaps it's the magnitude of the challenge itself... Maybe it's just sheer survival instinct? What makes you wanna take matters into your own hands?
