Non-Use

A research tradition in HCI that takes seriously the choice not to use a technology — treating refusal, abandonment, and selective engagement as meaningful, reasoned behaviour rather than as failure. Non-use scholarship (Wyatt, Baumer, Satchell & Dourish, Waycott and colleagues) has shown that older adults and disabled people often non-use technology for sophisticated reasons: self-protection, preservation of identity, emotional regulation, or incompatibility with the rest of their lives. Accessibility research that centres non-use avoids the trap of designing endlessly "better" versions of tools people have already reasonably rejected.