Making use: Attitudes to human-artifact engagements

•I articulate questions around characterizing the ‘function’ and ‘use’ of artifacts.•I critically compare design-centric, communicative, and use-centric attitudes.•Author-centricity, intentionalism, abstraction are common biases in approaching use.•Use can be recast as a kind of making: an embodied, dynamic process.•Making grammars are a promising candidate for computationally describing use-making.

‘Function’ and ‘use’ are keywords that design researchers customarily employ when referring to human-artifact engagements. However, there is little consensus about how the concepts of function and use relate to each other, to the intentions of ‘designers’ and ‘users’, or to their actions and encompassing contexts. In this paper, I synthesize literature from design research, material culture studies, design anthropology, and function theory in order to critically compare different attitudes to human-artifact engagements, implicit in characterizations of function and use. I identify design-centric, communicative, and use-centric attitudes, and discuss their assumptions and implications for design theory. I conclude by outlining principles for theoretically and computationally approaching use as an embodied and temporally contingent process – as a form of ‘making’.