Data Affordances and the Dynamics of Constraints in Redesign

Abstract

Designers inhabit a world of constraints - the limitations that shape what solution designs are practical. In this provocation, I would like to suggest that we should not only be interested in the day to day business of identifying what the constraints are and what their impact is, but also in understanding the dynamics of how constraints come into being, how they evolve over time, and how to relax them. Unwieldy constraints are a keenly felt problem, especially when dealing with legacy systems, but how they grow and behave has not been examined greatly in the design community. To begin this conversation, I identify a small set of loose principles of how constraints grow around a system. And I propose Data Affordances as a way of considering how the technology we design today constrains or offers affordances for future design.