This research investigates how user-modified objects can inform more inclusive, adaptable, and sustainable industrial design practices. By analyzing modifications made to everyday, mass-produced products, it explores how these interventions reveal friction points in design, and offer valuable insight into diverse user needs. The concept of “modification affordances” emerges to describe design features that support adaptation. Through interviews, qualitative coding, and a research-creation project, this study highlights user-driven innovation as a form of critique and collaboration. It calls on designers to embrace modifiability as a tool for democratizing design, enhancing longevity, and fostering more equitable and user-centered futures.