Lecture 9

pdf version

Meta-Design:
A Framework for the Future of End-User Development (EUD)

Gerhard Fischer, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick — Fall Semester 2010

gerhard@colorado.edu; haleden@colorado.edu; holger.dick@gmail.com;  

September 27, 2010

paper: Fischer, G. (2007): "Meta-Design: Expanding Boundaries and Redistributing Control in Design", Proceedings of the Interact'2007 Conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September, pp. 193-206; http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/Interact-2007.pdf

Topics

• meta-design

• end-users and end-users development

• design time and use time

• examples:

• Macros (in Word)
• CLever/MAPS
• Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory

• boundaries, control, motivation

• meta-design: democratizing design in many application domains

Meta-Design

• meta-design = creating new media and new technologies that allow users to act as designers and be creative (rather than being confined to consumers)

• meta-design emphasizes

• the creation of context rather than content
• puts the tools rather than the object of design in your hands
• does not define a product, but the conditions for a process of interaction

Meta-Design: Exploring Middle Ground

Turing Tar Pit: Inverse of the Turing Tar Pit:

Saw + Wood     Construction    Plastic Car

Kits

Meta-Design and Technical Construction Kits: An Airplane

Meta-Design and Technical Construction Kits: A Tipper Truck

Why Meta-Design?

• design for diversity (for “a universe of one” ? CLever Project)

• design as a process is tightly coupled to use and continues during the use of the system

• addresses and overcome problems of closed systems

• prerequisite for social creativity and innovation

• transcends a “consumer mindset”

Meta-Design — How We Think About It

• “if you give a fish to a human, you will feed him for a day — if you give someone a fishing rod, you will feed him for life” (Chinese Proverb)

• meta-design extends this to:

“if we can provide the knowledge, the know-how, and the tools for making fishing rods, we can feed the whole community”

Computer Scientists and End-Users

• computer scientist / programmers

• find computers intrinsically interesting
• like computers because they get to program

• end-users:

• are the owners of problems, have the domain knowledge, are competent practitioners and like computers because they get their work done
• regard computers as useful machines capable of helping them work more productively, creatively, and with greater pleasure
• end-user programmers are motivated by their domain and not by the merits of producing high-quality, dependable code
• enormous diversity between end-users

• ultimate goal / belief: end-users will use, tailor, extend and create their own computational artifacts if they have a supportive socio-technical environment

• communities of users will develop: power users, local developers, gardeners

Number of “Programmers” (in the USA)

• 3 million professional programmers

• 12 million people in workplaces that “do programming” at work

• 50 million use spreadsheets and databases ? they may potentially program doing

• spreadsheets systems
• web authoring tools
• business process authoring tools
• graphical languages

• source:

• Scaffidi, C., Shaw, M., & Myers, B. (2005) "Estimating the Numbers of End Users and End User Programmers." In Proceedings of 2005 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Dallas, Texas

What Do Meta-Designers Do?

• use their own creativity to create socio-technical environments in which other people can be creative

• create technical and social conditions for broad participation in design activities which are as important as creating the artifact itself

Concepts of Meta-Design

Consumer and Designers — A Continuum

Design Time and Use Time

world-as-imagined world-as-experienced

prediction reality

planning situated action

Computational Media
—
Extending Design Opportunities at Use Time

• print media: a fixed context for use time is decided at design time

• computational media:

• presentations at use time can take advantage of contextual factors only known at use time (about tasks, users, social systems,.....)
• examples: specification sheets and usage data, supporting dynamic forms, dynamic websites, user and task specific maps and traffic schedules....

• evolving existing systems: users (acting as designers) can transcend at use time the boundaries of the systems as developed at design time

Putting Owners of Problems in Charge: a Necessity not a Luxury
—
An Interview with a Geoscientist at CU Boulder

• I spend in average an hour every day developing software for myself to analyze the data I collected because there is not any available software.
   ? “reality is not user-friendly” and problems are unique

• Even if there is a software developer sitting next to me, it would not be of much help because my needs vary as my research progresses and I cannot clearly explain what I want to do at any moment.
  ? ill-defined problems cannot be delegated; they require “unselfconscious cultures of design”

• Even if the software developer can mange to write a program for me, I will not know if he or she has done it right without looking at the code.
   ? back-talk of the artifact under construction has to go back to the owner of the problem

Interview (continued)

• So I spent three months to gain enough programming knowledge to get by. Software development has now become an essential task of my research, but I do not consider myself a software developer and I don’t know many other things about software development. ?  ?  this geoscientist obviously is not just an end-user (or a “none-professional”); his software has thousands of lines and he has considerable programming skills
  
  ? it is equally obvious that he is not a software professional and does not intend to become one
  
  ? the number of end users creating software is far larger than the number of professional programmers.

Meta-Design Concepts (in Microsoft Word)
—
Users as Co-Developers

• tailor and customize the system by setting different parameters as their personal preferences

• extend and evolve existing information structures (e.g., menus, spelling dictionaries, auto-correct tables, …)

• write macros to create new operations (an example of “programming by example” or “programming by demonstration”)

• create programs in VisualBasic to extend the functionality of the system

• share the user-defined extensions

A Macro for Unwrapping Text

Meta-Design in the Cognitive Lever (CLever) Project

MAPS Script Editor

Use of MAPS in Mobility-for-All

Meta-Design Aspects in the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory

Closed versus Open Systems

• example for a closed system: SimCity — too much crime

• solution supported: build more police stations (fight crime)
• solution not supported: increase social services, improve education (prevent crime)

• important goal of EDC: create end-user modifiable versions of SimCity, because:

• background knowledge can never be completely articulated
• the world changes

Web 2.0: A Focus on Meta-Design

• source: Tim O’Reilly “What is Web 2.0 — Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software” 
  at: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Web 1.0 Web 2.0

Britannica Online ? Wikipedia

personal website ? blogging

publishing ? participation

content management systems ? wikis

scheduled software releases ? continuous improvements

individual contributions ? collective intelligence

• claim: network effects from user contributions (= knowledge sharing) are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era

Examples of Web 2.0 Environments Supported by Meta-Design

Cost-Scope Trade-offs in End-User Development (EUD) Tools

Meta-Design: Expanding Boundaries

• power of the few ? wisdom of the crowds

• socio-technical environments are living entities

• breaks down the sharp distinction between designers and users: users become co-designers

• democratizes design and innovation: meta-design eliminates the constraint that users are restricted to what is given to them

• revolutionizes the creation of systems: creates foundation for social production and mass collaboration

Meta-Design: Redistributing Control

• developers and user-designers: sharing control

• benign dictatorship
• council control
• complete decentralized

• control is desired only for personally meaningful problems

• the pitfalls associated with a “do-it-yourself” society

Motivational Aspects and Meta-Design

• what will make humans want to become designers/active contributors over time?

• serious working and learning does not have to be unpleasant but can be personally meaningful, empowering, engaging, and fun
• comment by an artist: “programming is not hard, but it is boring”

• what will make humans want to share? ? requires: mindset change, culture change, community knowledge bases, gift cultures, social capital

• more details: Fischer, G., Scharff, E., & Ye, Y. (2004) "Fostering Social Creativity by Increasing Social Capital." In M. Huysman, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Social Capital and Information Technology, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 355-399.

• who is the beneficiary and who has to do the work? ? organizational rewards

Utility = Value / Effort

• increase in value: motivation and rewards for a “design culture”

• feeling in control (i.e., independent from “high-tech scribes”)
• being able to solve or contribute to the solution of a problem
• mastering a tool in greater depth
• making an ego-satisfying contribution to a group
• enjoying the feeling of good citizenship to a community (“social capital”)

• decrease in effort:

• meta-design is hard
• extending meta-design to design for design communities

Consumer and Designers — Beyond Binary Choices

• claims:

• there is nothing wrong being a consumer (watching a tennis match, listening to a concert, ...)
• the same person wants to be a consumer in some situations and in others a designer
• consumer / designer is not an attribute of a person, but of a context
  consumer / designer ? f{person} ? f{context}

• problems:

• someone wants to be a designer but is forced to be a consumer ? personally meaningful activities
• someone wants to be a consumer but is forced to be a designer ? personally irrelevant activities

Meta-Design: Democratizing Design in Many Application Domains

• design: customization, personalization, tailorability, end-user development, design for diversity — Lieberman, H., Paterno, F., & Wulf, V. (Eds.) (2006) End User Development - Empowering people to flexibly employ advanced information and communication technology, Kluwer Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

• architectural design: underdesign, support for “unself-conscious culture of design” — Brand, S. (1995) How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, Penguin Books, New York.

• teaching and learning: teachers as facilitator, learning communities, courses-as-seeds — dePaula, R., Fischer, G., & Ostwald, J. (2001) "Courses as Seeds: Expectations and Realities," Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (Euro-CSCL' 2001), Maastricht, Netherlands, pp. 494-501.

• informed participation: beyond access, social creativity — Arias, E. G., Eden, H., Fischer, G., Gorman, A., & Scharff, E. (1999) "Beyond Access: Informed Participation and Empowerment," Proceedings of the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL '99) Conference, Stanford, pp. 20-32.

Democratizing Design in Many Application Domains — Continued

• open source: a success model of decentralized, collaborative, evolutionary development — Scharff, E. (2002) Open Source Software, a Conceptual Framework for Collaborative Artifact and Knowledge Construction, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder.

• living organizational memories: living organizational memories such as Web2Gether — dePaula, R. (2004) The Construction of Usefulness: How Users and Context Create Meaning with a Social Networking System, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder.

• digital libraries: community digital library — Wright, M., Marlino, M., & Sumner, T. (2002) Meta-Design of a Community Digital Library, D-Lib Magazine, Volume 8, Number 5, Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may02/wright/05wright.html.

• interactive art: collaboration, co-creation, puts the tools rather than the object of design in the hands of users — Giaccardi, E. (2004) Principles of Metadesign: Processes and Levels of Co-Creation in the New Design Space, Ph.D. Dissertation, CAiiA-STAR, School of Computing, Plymouth, UK.

Conclusions

• meta-design offers:

• to invent and design a culture in which all participants in collaborative design processes can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities

• meta-design requires

• a new mindset of all participants
• designers giving up some control at design time  
• active contributors and not just passive consumers at use time

• meta-design raises many issues and research problems of fundamental importance including

• new design methodologies
• a new understanding of cognition, collaboration, and motivation
• the design of new media and new technologies