Accept or appropriate? A design-oriented critique on technology acceptance models

Technology acceptance models are tools for predicting users’ reception of technology by measuring how they rate statements on a questionnaire scale. It has been claimed that these tools help to assess the social acceptance of a final IT product when its development is still underway. However, their use is not without problems. This paper highlights some of the underlying shortcomings that arise particularly from a simplistic conception of “acceptance” that does not recognize the possibility that users can invent new uses for (i.e., appropriate) technology in many situations. This lack of recognition can easily lead one to assume that users are passive absorbers of technological products, so that every user would adopt the same usages irrespective of the context of use, the differences in work tasks, or the characteristics of interpersonal cooperation. In light of recent research on appropriation, technology use must actually be understood in a more heterogeneous way, as a process through which different users find the product useful in different ways. This paper maintains that if, in fact, a single technology can be used for multiple purposes, then subscribing to the thinking arising from technology acceptance model research may actually lead one into suboptimal design solutions and thus also compromise user acceptance. Therefore, this paper also presents some starting points for designing specifically for easier technology appropriation.