‘Systems of Use’: Understanding and Empowering a Key User-Innovator Advantage

I define a ‘system of use’ as a collection of components that interact during use to accomplish a system-level goal. For example, all the products and behaviors that a tennis player combines and applies when playing tennis – tennis racket, tennis shoes, tennis game strategy, serving technique, nutrition and physical conditioning etc. -- are part of that player’s personal system of use, selected and applied to accomplish his or her system-level goal of playing tennis. I next observe that users systematically have more design freedom with respect making improvements to their own systems of use than do producers of system components simply because, with their greater control over their total systems, they can design, select, and co-adapt more system elements during innovation design that can any single element supplier. Of course, greater design freedom is only of value to users if they are also technically capable of innovating across their full systems of use. I therefore next explore how end user innovation capabilities can be supported and improved via a combination of system architecture and toolkits as a consciously-designed form of embodied cognition. The goal of these is to both focus end users on design tasks where their comparative innovation advantage is greatest, and to provide innovating end users with support for capable performance of specifically “their” tasks. I conclude with a discussion of implications for research and practice.