Unfinished by design: inviting improvisatory virtual placemaking through provotyping practices

This paper explores improvisation by non-designer technology users as a methodological lens for expanding the repertoire of codesign practice. Among online peer groups and relationships, communicators often enact creative ‘hacks’ that transform available technologies to foster a sense of shared space at a distance, from using video calls as windows to reinventing text messaging channels into dwellings. Recognising how such playful technology reconfiguration turns non-designers into codesigners, we emphasise the richness of user-led improvisation for collaborative interaction design. Situated within a research project on long-distance relationship practices, we report on a design provocation project exploring collaborative technological reinvention as a vehicle for virtual placemaking. Participants interacted playfully with a series of deliberately unstable ‘provotypes’, engaging in acts of improvisation while using them. These were not treated as problems to be solved, but as creative inputs for reflexive design. Bugs became openings; misuses became methods. We reflect on how playful experimentation became sites of codesign, positioning participants as co-arbiters of technological form in reappropriating digital applications towards a sense of place. In turn, we offer improvisatory placemaking not simply as a cultural reference point, but as a generative codesign framework that reclaims ‘misuse’ and improvisation as valuable modes of collaborative world-making.