Thus, neither photographer nor aesthetician, what am I doing here? I'm not doing aesthetics but I'm trying to build a thought that exceeds or replaces the general process of philosophical aesthetics and its descriptions. This is a practice of quite special genre that is not completely standard or recognized. A bit as though an artisan, to use a Socratic example, instead of making a camera based off of diagrams found in manuals, on the contrary had as his or her project the designing of a completely new apparatus of philo-fiction, thus capable of producing not simple photos, but photo-fictions.

Benedict Singleton on Platform Design

Platforms have their own logic: they work best when they don’t address a specific problem or respond to a predefined ‘need’ or ‘desire’, but instead solicit appropriation in unexpected ways, and find their reason for being through ongoing use. As we will see, this can create scenarios that seem strange when we’re used to thinking in terms of products or services: the platform is like a cross between an object that doesn’t have a defined point, and a plan that relies on the unforeseen in order to work. In this apparent paradox, however, we find a surprisingly consistent, and consistently surprising, way to rethink some of the basic parameters of design.