More on “Wombling”

Phil,
Marese and myself had a great, animated discussion about ‘wombling’
last night in the pub following Advance For Design, which was themed
around Ethnography and Trend-Watching in design. Here’s phil’s
follow-up mail which he’s kindly let me publish. There’s a very
interesting link in his ramble which points to methods for ‘system
optimisation’ – which in a dry way, you could argue is ‘wombling’.

“Stream of consiousness about wombling…

So we’re talking about a phonomenon of socio-cultural wombling, rather than engineering wombling.

It’s about users deviating from the designers path in
radical and unforseeable ways, and those deviations having a benevolent
effect. Look at the pictures half way down this page: http://home.earthlink.net/~bhelfrich/quip/

The examples we’ve seen are all very simple.
Disappointingly simple, really. Each instance is just an example of a
simple misappropriation of a single tool.

For example, SMS didn’t have to be joined to any other
technology in order to make a new thing. It was simply adopted by an
unexpected market segment.

The Web is an example of a piece of engineering wombling
(combine existing Internet hardware with TCP/IP with standard
high-level protocol tactics with SGML with cheap computing power) and
socio-cultural wombling (it exploded into a zillion dollar “industry”).
Engineers did the more exotic wombling. Or did they?

For tech wombling:
– A profusion of cheap, general purpose components
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For socio-cultural wombling:
– A simple, flexible product
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To exploit SC-wombling a company must:
– understand
that wombling is a pwoerful, money making phenomenon and invest their
time and effort into encouraing it. This many include altering their
infrastructure and processes to allow the quick wombling response
mentioned below.
– “listen” for signs of wombling on their product
– respond quickly by “tweaking” their product in ways that encourage wombling
– reward womblers?
[Add more]”