You know the Law of the Instrument saying about tools and hammers? For a SPLOT hammer, I am not sure what the nail would be (it’s not you!).
I (Alan Levine) though am plotting to write an actual academic article about the affordances of SPLOTs as a tool that takes advantage of being one built on top or within a most powerful one enables SPLOTs to be akin to a User Innovation Toolkit (von Hipple and Katz, 2002) — where tool makers “actually abandon the attempt to understand user needs in detail in favor of transferring need-related aspects of product and service development to users.”
My idea is that unlike technology tools that are supposedly created for specific educational purposes, the flexibility of a SPLOT means it can be shaped and bent to use not envisioned by its developer. Plus, there is a different relationship with a tool when we can make it do what we want, not what it allows.
I want to make a case that this is what SPLOTs do/have done since 2014. I want explore this via the evolution of features of one SPLOT, TRU Collector, that grew in response to suggestions of those who put it into use.
This is where I need your help– I am seeking stories and perspectives of people who have used TRU Collector for specific uses, often in ways I never imagined.
Can you help? Just to be clever, I am collecting these examples using TRU Collecto right here! Does that itself speak more about it being a User Innovation Toolkit?
If so, please add whatever you can spare to my Collection of TRU Collector sites.
For now, your responses are not publicly visible on this site, but you will be able to see your own. Eventually, they will be released and made available on the site (this too is a bending of the tool by means of flipping WordPress from showing new stuff at the front door).
Thank you again for keeping this SPLOT idea alive.
Alan Levine • @cogdog • https://cog.dog
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Featured Image: Pixabay Image by Stevepb shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 enhanced with the official SPLOT logo
