Digital Bricolage

• Digital bricolage is the creative practice of repurposing available digital resources and interfaces to overcome situational constraints.
• It integrates design principles like material generosity, spatial flexibility, and embodied interaction to promote adaptive, user-driven workflows.
• Its applications span cultural heritage, data science, and entrepreneurship, offering innovative frameworks for measurement, interface design, and resource recombination.

Digital bricolage refers to the practice of creatively reconfiguring, repurposing, and improvisationally adapting digital resources, tools, materials, and interfaces to achieve situated goals or facilitate novel workflows. Originating from Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage—“making do” with what is at hand—digital bricolage encompasses design, measurement, entrepreneurship, knowledge sharing, and creative domains, foregrounding bottom-up, materially attentive, and iterative practices distinct from prescriptive, top-down paradigms. It is increasingly applied in contexts spanning digitized cultural heritage, data science, platform entrepreneurship, collaborative craft, and creative ideation workflows, supporting fluid and adaptive engagements with digital artifacts and systems.

1. Theoretical Foundations and definitions

Digital bricolage extends the anthropological notion of bricolage—referring to the improvised recombination of available materials—into digital and computational domains. Across application areas, core characteristics include: (a) “making do” with available digital (and non-digital) resources, (b) iterative negotiation between high-level aims and situated constraints, and (c) foregrounding user agency in constructing or adapting systems, interfaces, and workflows (Sadek et al., 19 Dec 2025, Nassar et al., 2021, Guerdan et al., 3 Jul 2025, Batra et al., 12 Jun 2025). Rather than treating digital platforms, data, or interfaces as “finished” infrastructural solutions, digital bricolage treats them as generative spaces—resource assemblages to be reorganized, transformed, or reinterpreted in emergent, performative ways.

This approach stands in contrast to linear, deductive, or formulaic methodologies (e.g., in measurement, documentation, or search) that privilege standardization, optimization, or rigid workflow design. Digital bricolage is observed in design research, HCI, entrepreneurship, and computational creativity, and is theoretically linked with resource-based views, effectuation, opportunity creation, phenomenological HCI, and shape-grammar methods (Nassar et al., 2021, Guerdan et al., 3 Jul 2025, Bozkurt et al., 2021).

2. Design Principles and Interface Archetypes

In cultural heritage interface design, digital bricolage operationalizes four interdependent principles (Sadek et al., 19 Dec 2025):

• Material Generosity: Preserving and exposing the material affordances of digital surrogates—such as binding, typography, cover texture—rather than reducing objects to text-centric metadata or homogenized thumbnails.
• Spatial Flexibility: Providing non-linear, spatial canvases (e.g., “shelf” or “pile” views) to enable arrangement, juxtaposition, and handling reminiscent of the physical archival table.
• Embodied Interaction: Employing interaction techniques (pan, zoom, drag-and-drop, on-canvas tooltips) that cue analogies to tactile exploration—simulating the “feel” of browsing or maneuvering physical objects.
• Self-Curated Agency: Empowering users to group, reorganize, annotate, or combine items, so every filter, view, or grouping operation becomes an act of “making” a personally meaningful working archive.

Digital bricolage interfaces reject grid-based, search-and-filter-dominant designs in favor of “performance spaces” where collection navigation and sensemaking are enacted as improvisational, co-creative performances. Similar design logic appears in Inspiration Hunter for digital picture design, where the search–cut–transform–paste loop enables endless creative iteration with web data as raw material (Bozkurt et al., 2021).

3. Digital Bricolage in Measurement, Knowledge Construction, and Data Science

In applied data science, digital bricolage characterizes the process by which practitioners construct target variables or proxies in the face of ambiguous, messy, or resource-constrained environments (Guerdan et al., 3 Jul 2025). Rather than adhering strictly to classic measurement theory’s deductive specification, data scientists iteratively negotiate among competing objectives—validity, simplicity, predictability, portability, and resource requirements—through recombinatory strategies such as piggybacking, swapping, composing, bridging, and refining proxies or outcome definitions.

This process is formalized as an iterative cycle:

1. Initialize a candidate outcome based on existing data, theory, or precedent.
2. Evaluate it against major criteria (Table 1, (Guerdan et al., 3 Jul 2025)).
3. If deficiencies appear, adapt or recompose the definition using available digital/organizational resources.
4. Repeat until a “fit-for-purpose” solution is reached or the project is discontinued.

No single algorithm guarantees success; bricolage surfaces as an interactional, material–conceptual dialogue between practitioner, platform, data, and organizational constraints, often producing idiosyncratic yet pragmatically robust measurement workflows.

4. Digital Bricolage in Entrepreneurship and Platform Innovation

Entrepreneurial research highlights digital bricolage as a critical mechanism underpinning resource recombination and continuous innovation for startups navigating constrained environments (Nassar et al., 2021). Digital platforms serve as external enablers, permitting resource-limited ventures to systematically combine modular technical affordances, digital assets, and social capital in novel ways.

Three bricolage types are distinguished:

Bricolage Type	Resource Types	Platform-Enabled Mechanisms
Input Bricolage	Human skills, cloud infrastructure	Consultants, credits, negotiable services
Market Bricolage	Networks, referrals	Community building, pay-per-use
Institutional Bricolage	Routines, governance	Open-source toolkits, feedback loops

These mechanisms render businesses “less bounded,” enabling products and services to evolve post-launch via continuous deployment and user-driven adaptation. Digital bricolage aligns with theories of effectuation, opportunity creation, and non-linear entrepreneurial process, emphasizing that boundary-crossing improvisation is amplified, not diminished, by the affordances of digital platforms.

5. Grammars and Documentation of Digital Bricolage in Craft and Creative Practice

Workflow grammars encode digital bricolage by capturing not just linear task steps but also the improvisational, branching, and tacit adaptations characteristic of expert knowledge transfer in crafts (Batra et al., 12 Jun 2025). In CraftLink, for example, the elementary grammar formalizes workflows using LaTeX BNF notation with explicit support for:

• Action types: DO (doing) and SENSE (sensing), annotated with material and contextual parameters.
• Improv Patterns: Reflective loops, notes-to-self, external links, branches (conditional paths), revision loops (undo/redo).
• Context: Granularity shifts, expertise tiers, and temporal markers.

This grammar enables the partial capture of embodied knowledge—supported by LLM analysis and graph-based navigation—and demonstrates that fluid documentation can support both high-level sharing of intent and detailed representation of situated improvisation. Yet, the studies reveal that some tacit, “felt” knowledge defies easy formal capture, underscoring both the strengths and limitations of current digital bricolage documentation.

6. Implications and Future Directions

Digital bricolage signals a methodological and epistemic shift in how digital systems are designed, engaged with, and evaluated. Key implications include:

• Heritage system design: Guidelines advocate for surfacing material affordances, supporting non-linear arrangement, and embedding agency and contextual annotation to counter institutional homogenization and gatekeeping (Sadek et al., 19 Dec 2025).
• Collaborative creativity tools: Systems like Inspiration Hunter or CraftLink propose shape grammars and graph representations that make creative process and improvisation both legible and manipulable (Bozkurt et al., 2021, Batra et al., 12 Jun 2025).
• Measurement tools: Future systems may offer scaffolded trade-off dashboards, notebook extensions for rapid proxy recombination, and interfaces for multi-stakeholder deliberation over outcome construction (Guerdan et al., 3 Jul 2025).
• Entrepreneurship and organizational flexibility: Institutional support (credits, open-source access, community building) is essential to maximize the generativity of digital bricolage, especially in resource-constrained, digitally mediated environments (Nassar et al., 2021).

Potential future research directions include quantitative modeling of resource recombination, longitudinal studies tracing the evolution of bricolage-enabled workflows, and integration with tangible/mixed-reality systems to further blur boundaries between digital and material improvisation. A plausible implication is that as collaborative, improvisational, and performance-oriented paradigms proliferate, digital bricolage will become increasingly central to theorizing and enacting creative, equitable, and context-sensitive computing.