Elisa Giaccardi

Meta-design: a manifesto for end-user development

End-user development (EUD) activities range from customization to component configuration and programming. Office software, such as the ubiquitous spreadsheet, provides customization facilities, while the growth of the Web has added impetus to end-user scripting for interactive functions in Web sites. In scientific and engineering domains, end users frequently develop complex systems with standard programming languages such as C++ and Java. However, only a minority of users adapt commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software products. Indeed, composing systems from reusable components, such as enterprise resource planing (ERP) systems, defeats most end users who resort to expensive and scarce expert developers for implementation.

Meta-design: A Framework for the Future of End-User Development

In a world that is not predictable, improvisation, evolution, and innovation are more than a luxury: they are a necessity. The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of including it and making it an opportunity for more creative and more adequate solutions to problems. Meta-design is an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. It extends the traditional notion of system design beyond the original development of a system to include a coadaptive process between users and a system, in which the users become co-developers or codesigners. It is grounded in the basic assumption that future uses and problems cannot be completely anticipated at design time, when a system is developed. Users, at use time, will discover mismatches between their needs and the support that an existing system can provide for them. These mismatches will lead to breakdowns that serve as potential sources of new insights, new knowledge, and new understanding. This paper is structured in four parts: conceptual framework, environments, applications, and findings and challenges. Along the structure of the paper, we discuss and explore the following essential components of meta-design, providing requirements, guidelines, and models for the future of end-user development: (1) the relationship of meta-design to other design methodologies; (2) the Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, Reseeding (SER) Model, a process model for large evolving design artifacts; (3) the characteristics of unselfconscious cultures of design, their strengths and their weaknesses, and the necessity for owners of problems to be empowered to engage in end-user development; (4) the possibilities created by meta-design to bring co-creation alive; and (5) the need for an integrated design space that brings together a technical infrastructure that is evolvable, for the design of learning environments and work organizations that allow endusers to become active contributors, and for the design of relational settings in which users can relate, find motivations and rewards, and accumulate social capital.

Beyond binary choices: integrating individual and social creativity

The power of the unaided individual mind is highly overrated. Although society often thinks of creative individuals as working in isolation, intelligence and creativity result in large part from interaction and collaboration with other individuals. Much human creativity is social, arising from activities that take place in a context in which interaction with other people and the artifacts that embody collective knowledge are essential contributors.This paper examines: (1) how individual and social creativity can be integrated by means of proper collaboration models and tools supporting distributed cognition; (2) how the creation of shareable externalizations (boundary objects) and the adoption of evolutionary process models in the construction of meta-design environments can enhance creativity and support spontaneous design activities (unselfconscious cultures of design); and (3) how a new design competence is emerging one that requires passage from individual creative actions to synergetic activities, from the reflective practitioner to reflective communities and from given tasks to personally meaningful activities. The paper offers examples in the context of collaborative design and art practice, including urban planning, interactive art and open source. In the effort to draw a viable path beyond binary choices, the paper points out some major challenges for the next generation of socio-technical environments to further increase the integration of individual and social creativity.

Creativity Support Tools: Report From a U.S. National Science Foundation Sponsored Workshop

Creativity support tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower users to be not only more productive but also more innovative. Potential users include software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, architects, educators, students, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in hypothesis formation, speedier evaluation of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (e.g., computer programs, scientific papers, engineering diagrams, symphonies, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking. This U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes emerged: (a) encouragement to evaluate creativity support tools through multidimensional in-depth longitudinal case studies and (b) formulation of 12 principles for design of creativity support tools.

Creativity and evolution: a metadesign perspective

Abstract In a world that is not predictable, improvisation and evolution are more than a luxury: they are a necessity. The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of making it an opportunity for more creative and more sustainable solutions. User-centered and participatory design approaches have focused primarily on activities taking place at design time. These approaches have not given enough emphasis and they have provided few mechanisms to support systems as living entities that can evolve over time. Metadesign is a unique design approach concerned with opening up solution spaces rather than complete solutions (hence the prefix meta-), and aimed at creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. This approach extends the traditional notion of design beyond the original development of a system to include co-adaptive processes between users and systems that enable the users to act as designers in personally meaningful activities and be creative.

The social production of heritage through cross-media interaction: making place for place-making.

The living relationship between intangible and tangible forms of heritage, as well as natural and cultural heritage, is a situated one, always in place. Information and communications technology (ICT) is opening up new ways of experiencing and thinking about heritage by allowing for cross‐media interaction. By combining different media and technologies, cross‐media interaction supports the social production of heritage and creates ‘infrastructures’ that act as places of cultural production and lasting values at the service of a living heritage practice.

Metadesign as an Emergent Design Culture

The concept of metadesign was adopted in the 1980s regarding the use of information technologies in relation to art, cultural theories and design practices (from interactive art to biotechnological design). This article introduces theories and practices of metadesign and contributes to the unfolding of metadesign as an emergent design culture, calling for an expansion of the creative process in the new design space engendered by information technologies.

Affective geographies: toward a richer cartographic semantics for the geospatial web

Due to the increasing sophistication in web technologies, maps can easily be created, modified, and shared. This possibility has popularized the power of maps by enabling people to add and share cartographic content, giving rise to the geospatial web. People are increasingly using web maps to connect with each other and with the urban and natural environment in ways no one had predicted. As a result, web maps are growing into a venue in which knowledge and meanings can be traced and visualized. However, the cartographic semantics of current web mapping services are not designed to elicit and visualize what we call affective meaning. Contributing a new perspective for the geospatial web, the authors argue for affective geographies capable of allowing richer and multiple readings of the same territory. This paper illustrates the cartographic semantics developed by the authors and discusses it through a case study in natural heritage interpretation.

Understanding the nature of collaboration in open-source software development

Our approach to better understand the nature of collaboration in open-source software (OSS) development is to view it as a participative system, where people and artifacts are inter-connected via a computational infrastructure demonstrating a socio-technical system. This paper presents a framework we have developed to describe a participative system, and discusses our hypothesis that the framework is capable of characterizing the evolution of an OSS community through changing the participants perceived value and types of engagement. We report a preliminary result of our case study on the GIMP development mailing list as an initial step to test this hypothesis.

About face interface: creative engagement in the new media arts and HCI

By promoting divergent thinking and creative visions, new media art practices present HCI research with a platform that emphasizes creative engagement as a locus for innovative design and evaluation methods. The workshop goal is to identify attributes of a conceptual framework that positions creative engagement as a hub for future transdisciplinary research and incorporates practices and theories from the new media arts, HCI, and computer science research.