Recently I listened to the 99% Invisible episode “The Help-Yourself City,” and it was much more interesting than I expected. The episode explores DIY urbanism: the little illegal-but-kind-of-understandable interventions people make in cities when official systems fail them. Things like residents painting their own crosswalks because the city won’t, placing traffic cones to reserve parking spots, building unofficial benches in their neighborhood, or taping up handmade signs to guide confused pedestrians.
An interesting point that was made was that people reshape their environments not out of rebellion (okay, sometimes out of rebellion) but mostly out of necessity. They see a problem, feel unheard, and then just decide to fix it themselves. And suddenly the city becomes this playground of small, improvised design decisions made by people who would never call themselves designers.
Listening to this made me realize how often design is treated as a top-down discipline. We create systems, UIs, layouts, streets, signs, apps — and expect users to adapt. But this episode flips the table: users constantly adapt our designs by bending them, hacking them, “misusing” them. The city becomes a reminder that “user behavior” isn’t just something to accommodate; it’s something to learn from. These tiny interventions show what people actually need, beyond what official planning claims to provide.
The creative impulse I took from this was that design should invite appropriation instead of resisting it. If people are modifying their surroundings, there’s a gap in the design. And that gap isn’t a failure — it’s a piece of insight.
For my own work I should more often ask myself: How could people misappropriate my work? How could they “co-design” it? How can I create systems that allow for bending, customizing, hacking — or at least acknowledging that this will happen anyway. The city doesn’t fight back when someone zip-ties a DIY sign to a lamppost. It just absorbs it. Maybe more digital products should behave like that, too: more porous, more flexible, more willing to be reshaped.
There’s also something philosophically beautiful about the idea that design doesn’t end when we’re done designing. The world edits it afterwards. And maybe the best designs are the ones that tolerate — or even encourage — these edits.
