A5Hiphophippotomi

A5Hiphophippotomi

To-Do

1. Please work as a group (minimum: 2 members; max: 6 members — discuss the answers between your group members) and submit one answer as a group (clearly identifying the members of your group)
2. Choose a web site and claim it as yours by editing the list on the Meta-Design Sites page (first come – first served)

Describe your understanding of meta-design in your own words (not copying a paragraph from a paper or a website)

Meta design is design concept that aims to optimize a socio-technical infrastructure such that improvement can take place.Original designers anticipate that users will act as co-designers during the developmental phase. After the product is released from the original designers to the users, the control of the product is shifted. Users will discover needs and preferences that the original designers did not anticipate, simply by using the product. These new findings provide new knowledge for future products or systematic upgrades.

Setting: you are talking to another student who is interested in design; how would you explain to her/him the strengths and weakness of meta-design as a design methodology

Were the benefits of meta design to be discussed with another student, the first thing that comes to mind to mention as a strength would be the idea that meta design “emphasizes the context in which people can provide the content” (Fischer, lecture). When one practices meta design, one releases a seed instead of a completely constructed artifact. Because the solution to the problem the user is trying to solve will thus be 'personally meaningful', the user will be more apt to like the solution. The idea is akin to working with legos or building blocks; the user is free to construct his/her own model, but is not required to mold each plastic block by hand. One must remember that the number of people who program drastically outnumbers the number of professional programmers in the traditional sense. Many higher level users could use these blocks (such as in the Android programming environment) to construct programs instead of being forced to memorize a language's specific syntactical oddities.

If one attempts to anticipate all of a user's need's at run time in the design phase such as one would do in the realm of the professional development design methodology, one's anticipations may (and probably will) fall short. This is especially true in the cases where the users become a “universe of one” (Fischer, article). In these cases, one user's needs will be distinctly different from another's, thus requiring the ability to create dynamic solutions to individual problems.

The antithesis of the meta design methodology is end users who do not require personally meaningful solutions, and instead wish to use a program for its basic functionality and do not require any additional applicability. The process of motivating such individuals to contribute to a code base would be difficult, and the SER model would be lacking in evolutionary growth. The applicability of the methodology meta design to a specific problem depends on the nature of that problem, and the potential and willingness of one's end users to, instead, become prosumers that both produce and consume. In situations where the solutions must be diverse, a meta design methodology will flourish, but in situations where a cookie cutter approach to problem solving is sufficient, it will not.

Which Web site did you select?

http://secondlife.com/

Analyze your chosen web site from a meta-design perspective:

"virtual worlds(Second Life) are other good examples of how the diverse and collective stock of scientific content and artistic or stylistic ideas that individuals and communities share, re-interpret, and use as a basis for new ideas and visions constitutes the vital source of creativity and evolution."

Creativity and evolution: a metadesign perspective. Elisa Giaccardi, Gerhard Fischer Digital Creativity 19:11, 19-32, Routledge, 3/2008

Second Life is a virtual world where users can live out a "second life". It was developed by Linden Labs in 2003, and the users, or "residents", can develop their own objects and add functionality to them. Second Life was originally developed as an objective based simulation, but has since developed into a user driven community based software. Residents can subjectively define their reality in the game, and game play is driven by creativity. From this perspective, Second Life is a very strong Meta-Designed utility.

However, the game play is limited to the servers that Second Life exists on. Also, while there is a huge amount of creativity involved in creation of the environment, it's limited by the software that it is designed on. For a unique domain, however, Second Life does a remarkably good job for a commercially available software in keeping the users desires for creative control in mind. Indeed, this is what drives much of why Second Life has been so revolutionary. The creators of Second Life definitely had Meta Design in mind, or at least the concept, when they created the virtual world.

Please provide the names of your group members who contributed to this answer.

Hiphophippotomi: Jon Mai, Ariel Aguilar, & Eric Holton