Designing Technology for Learning: How to Get from Disenfranchisement to Disinheritance and Why We Need to Go There

Abstract

This paper describes ruptures in design practice and designed products that manifest as an experience of design that I call disinheritance. Disinheritance is the relationship a learner has to a designed tool or environment that makes the learner perceive it as not designed for them, not belonging to them. Disinheritance offers new ways of combining design-based interventions with ethnography about design in a “marginalized” part of the world, and is necessarily also concerned with economics, politics and how they shape design on a global scale. Building on Vygotsky’s cultural heritage and Marx’s alienation, the theory of disinheritance sets a new programmatic agenda for learning sciences research.