I sometimes talk about a tension between ‘usability and hackability‘, and somewhat pessimistically about how, most of the time, technology (in the broadest, most social sense of the word) teaches us what we should do with it, and how we should do those things. I need to get more across current thinking in interaction design/critical design theory though. This patient, careful post by Dan Hill, a transcript of an interview where he outlines his contribution to a forthcoming book on the subject, is a big help:

The discourse around hackability is often littered with “hooks, sockets, plugs, handles” and so on. With adaptive design, drawing from the language of architecture more than code, we have a more graceful, refined vocabulary of “enabling change in fast layers building on stability in slow layers”, “designing space to evolve”, “time being the best designer” and so on. This suggests that there could be a distinction; that adaptive design is perhaps the process designed to enable careful articulation and evolution, as opposed to hackability’s more open-ended nature.

However, they still draw from the same basic concepts: of design being an ongoing social process between designer and user; of products evolving over time; of enabling the system to learn across an architecture of loosely-coupled layers; of not over-designing.

[…]

My favourite sentence:
In adaptive design, designers must enable the experience/object to ‘learn’, and users to be able to ‘teach’ the experience/object.

Current thesis word count: 27,117.