Deliverables:
- Use and non-use as continuum
- Relevance of non-use for HCI research
- Users and non-users in HCI design
Use and non-use as continuum
Largely critiques of fitting users into the following curve, and through those critiques, unpacking more types of non-use.
| Type of non-use | Definition | HCI issue/problem raised |
|---|---|---|
| Lagging Adoption | People who have not adopted a technology yet, relative to a diffusion/adoption curve. Non-use is viewed as temporary. | HCI tends to treat non-users merely as future users and focuses on converting them into users through better usability, overlooking non-use as meaningful in itself. |
| Active Resistance | Deliberate, considered refusal to adopt or use a technology. Motivations may include privacy, autonomy, politics, health, environmental concerns, or resistance to broader social changes. | HCI often dismisses resisters as irrelevant or irrational. Dourish argues resistance reveals important concerns about accountability, control, visibility, dependence, and social values that designers should study. |
| Disenchantment | Reluctant, partial, or avoided use driven by nostalgia and perceptions that technological interaction is less authentic than previous forms of interaction. | HCI should treat nostalgic complaints as indicators of anxieties about changing sociotechnical relationships, rather than simply resistance to progress. |
| Disenfranchisement | Non-use caused by exclusion from technological arrangements due to disability, geography, infrastructure, culture, economics, or social position. | HCI often assumes certain users as universal while rendering marginalized populations invisible. Research agendas can unintentionally privilege affluent, Western, mobile, and technologically equipped populations. |
| Displacement | People benefit from and engage with a technology indirectly through others who use it on their behalf. They do not operate the technology directly but still experience its effects. | Challenges the concept of “the user.” HCI’s focus on direct interaction ignores people whose lives are shaped by technology without hands-on use. |
| Disinterest | People simply do not find a technology or the problems it addresses relevant, meaningful, or worth engaging with. | HCI may become preoccupied with problems that matter to researchers but not to broader populations. It risks assuming instrumental value where users are motivated by identity, aesthetics, culture, or consumption instead. |
This paper in whole is arguing that more attention should be given to the non-users, because they have useful things to say about any given technology.