A6JoeMcCabeBenjaminGoldenNickHughesGrahamRoberts

A6JoeMcCabeBenjaminGoldenNickHughesGrahamRoberts

To-Do

please create an answer via the form for this assignment addressing the following issues:

• which was the most interesting idea/concept you learned from the article? what is the relationship of this idea/concept to your own work and own thinking?
• which is the most prominent meta-design environment you can think off? Why?
• analyze one computational environment in detail from a meta-design perspective? (if you can't think of a better one: analyze Microsoft-Word)
• argue in which sense the American constitution may be considered as a success example for meta-design

Most interesting idea/concept

Nick -

Being an artist, of course the most interesting concept to me was the idea of interactive art. In the paper interactive art is described as a tool that puts creativity in the hands of the users, allowing for a collaborative, co-creation experience which opens up the possibility for creativity for non-artists. I can understand all of those things, but the way that the examples were explained did not do justice to the concept.

My primary concern is that this is a recent article that uses examples from the 1980's. Since then, things have changed drastically in the art world, and interactive art has become more aligned with video games and multimedia performances which involve the audience. Another problem arises when one tries to relate this idea of meta-design to art in only an interactive art setting, because the idea of "meta" in art is so closely linked to things other than interaction, mostly being works that somehow reveal their process of creation within the work itself. So in the realm of art, it is too narrow to describe only interactive art as meta, while at the same time it is more correct to describe meta-art as something entirely different.

The article states "the aesthetics of co-creation developed in interactive art comes up with an approach to design that shares with meta-design concerns about interaction, participation, and collaboration as means for an expansion of human activity," and goes on to say, "hence we are shown its capability to increase the scope and complexity of the space of creation." I feel like these things could be assumed by a computer scientist to be true about art, but that while it sounds convincing, it is not entirely true to an artist. To an artist, meta-design concerns about interaction and participation and collaboration would not necessarily be meant to expand human activity, or to increase the scope and complexity at all. In fact, they may simply choose to work collaboratively to simplify their final product by synthesizing several ideas or styles into one, or choose to include interaction to hinder creativity by limiting the possible meanings of the work itself. When it comes down to it, artists today can be everything you would and everything you wouldn't expect them to be, and to assume that meta-art or meta-design subscribes to a single goal is very misleading. In a scientific, rational way, it would seem problematic for an artist to want to produce anything but progress with their work, as well as expansion of human creativity, and complexity, and so forth, but when it comes down to it, artists can be downright irrational and unpredictable. I am just not quite sure if the idea of interactive art fully represents the world of meta-art in an accurate way, or if meta-design has the same meaning for an artist as it does a computer scientist.

Most Prominent Example

Graham -

One meta-design environment that I have come in contact with lately is the MediaWiki software. MediaWiki has three different forms of extensibility for the end user. The first is the extensions for MediaWiki, which add new functionality to the wiki itself, such as support for different HTML tags, or different types of image browsers. Any user can develop extensions that can be used across all wikis that are built on top of MediaWiki. This allows the user to play the part as developer in their own system. This requires a fairly expert user, who is comfortable with the way MediaWiki works as well as a knowledge of PHP programming.

The second way the user can extend the wiki is to add templates, which define a certain behavior that can be reused on many different pages. This saves the developer and other users time and effort for tasks that are performed frequently. One example of this might be a info box that can be used to store important information about some item; if there was a box for a country, the box could hold Name, Capital, Population, etc. This could then be used for all countries, or another info box could be used to hold information about car models. So in this way the developer can extend the MediaWiki. This is less difficult than the extensions, but still requires an understanding of the way the wiki works.

Finally the users can extend the wiki by just writing pages that are documentation on the wiki, or on any other subject. This is the easiest way that users can get involved in the development of the wiki. It allows users to contribute their ideas to other developers for the future direction of the wiki.

Detailed Analysis

Ben -

I think World of Warcraft can be seen as an excellent example of meta-design. For one thing the game is an example of a computer system (or in this case game) that continually evolves over time. This can be seen on multiple levels including ones that are effected exclusively by developers, exclusively by end users, and also by both end users and developers. For example: the core content of the game is developed almost exclusively by developers, the details of how the game engine processes several calculations for the game are intentionally unknown to users, However this represents only a small portion of the design that goes on in and around the game. Additionally certain aspects of the game are openly criticized and discussed on forums by both users and developers in a collaborative conversation. These various game rules undergo revisions to better suit the needs and desires of the user. Additionally World of Warcraft allows for user created addons that can modify the user interface of the game. Users have been allowed access to information and tools that have allowed them to make modifactions that can make the game interface appear completely different from one user to the next. These changes can be moderate, involving the repositioning of buttons on the screen, or the addition of new buttons. Or even more extreme, creating entirely new functionality, like accesssing an in game database of in game equipment not otherwise available to players. Furthermore I think in many ways it can be said that much of the design follows the SER model. Patches to the game are released on a regular basis and include design that takes place by developers with input from a sub-population of the game playing on test servers. This is the initial seeding. Then the patch is released and the larger body of users get to experience the content, modifying existing addons to interact with new content, and creating new addons which arise from the new content in the patch. This is the evolutionary growth. Finally a new game environment exists that is substantially different from those of previous patches. At which point a new patch is developed and the cycle is repeated. This is the re-seeding.

American constitution as Meta-Design

Joe -

Even though the constitution was written over 200 years ago, in a different time period, it still successfully addresses our country's problems to this day. The founding fathers laid out a framework with basic ideas of what they thought was correct, and allowed the framework to be manipulated by the future users to suit their needs. As the time passed, new social issues arose or the concepts of what was morally correct changed, and the constitution as a framework allowed the citizens to change the document that controlled their country.