“Wombling”

Paul, who is director of technology where I work sent the article
below round the company this morning, with some comments about the Wombles –
creatures from 70’s children’s TV in the UK, who “made good use of the
things that they find, things which the everyday folk leave behind” .
Paul called the tech product in the article something that used ‘the wombling approach to engineering’. Made me think that wombling is not just confined to smart engineers and product designers, but the user community also wombles
– finds the best ways to use your system, backdoors, forgetten
features, and spreads them through the community… SMS was wombled…
amazon’s wishlists were wombled into blog-content… wombling is consumer-hacking…

How to successfully design for wombles? Structure your design and build
and learn and adapt processes to leave good things around then let the
community use them, evolve them…?? How do you make that into good
business sense in these non-experimental times?? I think you can, and
that’s the case I’m trying to figure out at the moment…

“Elegance is the key. It is only maybe once a year that we at Interface
see something so beautifully conceived. This is one of those times. If
engineering perfection is found when there is nothing left to be taken
away, then Dr Dror Lapidot and his Israel-based company Decell are as
close as they come.”

Cutting a path through the traffic – The Times

More on wombling…
Raster wombling? Is that when Orinoco had dreads during his ‘experimental’ late-teens?

Or is it something far more magical…?