Revisiting Piggyback Prototyping: Examining Benefits and Tradeoffs in Extending Existing Social Computing Systems

TL;DR

This paper critically examines piggyback prototyping in social computing, highlighting its benefits like ecological validity and challenges such as privacy concerns, and offers design recommendations and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of piggyback prototyping's advantages, limitations, and ethical considerations, guiding future research and practice in social computing system design.

Findings

Enhances ecological validity of social computing prototypes.

Leverages existing features to reduce development effort.

Raises privacy and customization concerns.

Abstract

The CSCW community has a history of designing, implementing, and evaluating novel social interactions in technology, but the process requires significant technical effort for uncertain value. We discuss the opportunities and applications of "piggyback prototyping", building and evaluating new ideas for social computing on top of existing ones, expanding on its potential to contribute design recommendations. Drawing on about 50 papers which use the method, we critically examine the intellectual and technical benefits it provides, such as ecological validity and leveraging well-tested features, as well as research-product and ethical tensions it imposes, such as limits to customization and violation of participant privacy. We discuss considerations for future researchers deciding whether to use piggyback prototyping and point to new research agendas which can reduce the burden of implementing the method.