The converged appliance: "I love it... but I hate it"

The last decade has seen convergence marketed as one response to the challenge of users having to juggle an increasingly wide array of digital services, technologies and media. Key to this view is the assumption that by converging computer devices, and digital media, the value of technology for end users can be maximised whilst the overheads involved in purchasing, maintaining and orchestrating a variety of different technology solutions can be minimised. In contrast however, some authors have argued that convergence creates weak-general solutions, and rather we should be aiming for strong-specific technology by means of the deliberate design of multiple diverged devices. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of convergence and divergence. We discuss three apparently irreconcilable perspectives on the relationship between functionality and usability, and show that they are in fact complementary views of convergence. To ground this discussion we draw on the results of a recent cultural probes study of a cohort of early adopters of converged devices.