Architectures of Appropriation

Appropriation Infrastructure: Mediating Appropriation and Production Work

End User Development offers technological flexibility to encourage the appropriation of software applications within specific contexts of use. Appropriation needs to be understood as a phenomenon of many collaborative and creative activities. To support appropriation, we propose integrating communication infrastructure into software application that follows an“easy-to-collaborate”-principle. Su...

Heidegger's Appropriation of Kant

Being and Time, Heidegger praises Kant as “the first and only person who has gone any stretch of the way towards investigating the dimension of temporality or has even let himself be drawn hither by the coercion of the phenomena themselves” (SZ: 23). Kant was, before Husserl (and perhaps, in Heidegger's mind, more than him), a true phenomenologist in the sense that the need to curtail the prete...

Kant's “Appropriation” of Lampe's God

An American Appropriation of Buddhism

It is rather difficult to get an accurate picture of the number of practising Buddhists in the United States. In 1975, Barrett estimated 190,000 persons, or approximately 0.1% of the population and one would expect this figure to be mainly composed of descendants of Chinese and Japanese immigrants affiliated to the Jodo shinshu inspired Buddhist Churches of America with some Nichiren shoshu of ...

Designing for appropriation

Ethnographies often show that users appropriate and adapt technology in ways never envisaged by the designers, or even deliberately subverting the designers’ intentions. As design can never be complete, such appropriation is regarded as an important and positive phenomenon. However designing for appropriation is often seen as an oxymoron; it appears impossible to design for the unexpected. In t...