The Spectrum of Meta-Design Environments: The Correlation of Openness and Purpose

Authors of this document are the Makeshift Crew: 

Alberto Aranda
Andy Truman
Anne Gatchell
Ho Yun "Bobby" Chan
Kyla Maletsky

I.) Abstract

We propose an extended definition of meta-design that relates the intent of the meta-designer to the degree of allowed user freedom. Current definitions make it difficult to determine strict success or failure of meta-design environments. Indeed, we think that measuring success of meta-design is not clearly black and white. Instead, meta-design environments can be depicted along a spectrum of "user control," where environments are made to allow different levels of user-control, depending on the goals of the meta-designers. The level of openness is an important consideration when designing an environment, because openness has profound effects on the environment's professionalism, usability, etc. Allowing a large amount of freedom can mean that amateurs may make the site unreadable, for example. However, making a site too rigid can frustrate users who want to change things or do them in a certain way. The designer must decide how easy it will be to make changes, how much can be changed, and how much knowledge the user must possess in order to make valuable alterations. In this paper, we define a spectrum in which we list existing meta-design environments ranked by the amount of user-control each environment permits. This rank is quantified using results from a poll where a group of users rate various environments based on different criteria such as the ability of users to affect the evolution of the environment. By presenting concrete examples of meta-design environments, we aim to show that the degree to which designers apply meta-design principle should vary depending on their goals.

II.) Keywords

meta-design, continuum of mutability, Web 2.0, successful web design, user-designer interaction 

III.) Problem / Goal
5.1.) Statement of the Problem / Goal — including how your understanding of the problem /goal has changed while you have worked on it over the period of the course

When we first attempted to define meta design, we spent a lot of time trying to decide which environments were meta-design and which were not, and whether or not these environments were a success. However, we found that we were unable to make strict black-and-white judgments on whether or not something can be classified as meta-design, and whether or not meta-design makes an environment successful. We determined that it is not always better or worse to have a higher degree of user control. The only way to determine whether or not an environment is a successful example of meta-design is to consider the goals of the environment in relation to how much the environment is allowed to evolve through collaboration.

With this in mind, we decided to make our own definition of meta-design. We want an accessible and easily understandable definition, but one that also gives designers a good impression of how much user control they should use. In coming up with this definition, we considered the following questions:

• How can meta design be explained in an easily accessible and readily applicable manner?
• What makes a meta-design environment successful?
• How can environments best apply various aspects of meta-design?

5.2.) Rationale — explain why the problem /goal is interesting and important?

The explosion of Web 2.0 and collaborative endeavors is evidence of the importance of meta-design. As these ideas spread, people will have greater expectations for freedom in web environments. Even now, most people are not satisfied with environments that do not allow them to be flexible. At the same time, it is becoming more important that people can contribute and collaborate across disciplines. Meta-design is a powerful design methodology, but much of its potential is lost if only a tiny portion of the population even understands what it means. As it becomes possible for non-computer scientists to design websites, it must also become possible for those people to access information about creating successful environments.

6.) Methodologies (e.g.: questionnaire, interview, data analysis, software development, testing of other developments, contribution to a Wiki site…..)

Based on our vision of a spectrum of meta-design, we rated various environments and products. These ratings help us to identify which meta-design environments are more or less mutable by the user. This will be used to quantify our spectrum for the meta-design environments. We also developed a survey for the class.

Initially, our ratings were entirely subjective, based on our own discussions and opinions, but we hope to introduce a more systematic way of rating different environments, though we acknowledge that it will not be entirely possible to get an objective and quantitative method for rating them.

As a first step, we compared different sites by discussing how changeable they are in different ways. We searched for both virtual and physical environments that could be considered meta-design. As we accumulated a list of many environments, we also started to define aspects of the sites that qualified them as meta-design. After much discussion and editing, we came up with five basic questions that address different aspects of meta-design:

• Ability to share opinions with other users (i.e. comments and/or ratings)
• Ability to share information and creations
• Ability of users to affect the evolution of the environment
• Extent to which environment aids user's creativity
• Degree to which underlying structure of the code can be changed

We created a survey of all of our meta-design environments, where each one would be rated on a scale of 1-5 for each of the above qualities. To get some outside perspective, we gave the survey to the class after a progress report speech in which we described our vision for the spectrum. We included only Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, Amazon, Linux, SketchUp/3D Warehouse in the class's survey. For our more extensive spectrum, we each filled out a survey for all of the meta-design sites we had accumulated.

We understand that some of these meta-design aspects are more pronounced aspects of meta-design. For example, being able to modify the underlying code of an environment is more reminiscent of meta-design than is aiding user creativity. Therefore, we assigned a weight, from 0 to 1, to each of these meta-design aspects. To calculate a score along the mutability scale, we multiplied each survey score by its weight, added the weights, and scaled everything down to be between 0 and 1. The weights we assigned are as follows:Ability to share opinions with other users (i.e. comments and/or ratings), 0.3: While it is important to be able to share with others, this may not end up changing the environment to a large extent. For example, the comments page could easily be a small section of the page, not visible, and not affecting the grand evolution of the environment.

Ability to share information and creations, 0.45: This can affect the changeability of the environment to some degree, since sharing a large amount of creations can end up affecting others who use the environment, effectively transforming the environment for the better.
Ability of users to affect evolution of the environment, 1.0: This received the highest score for mutability, because evolution equates to mutability.
Extent to which environment aids user's creativity, 0.15: This received a relatively low score, because any environment, meta-design or not, can encourage creativity.
Degree to which underlying structure of the code can be changed, 0.9: This received a high score for mutability, because it represents fundamental user control.

Using the average of the scoring given to all of our environments, we placed them on the spectrum accordingly.

7.) Related Work
7.1.) use this section to argue the uniqueness of your contribution

"Our 'metadesign' methodology seeks to combine existing resources 'bisociatively' in order to create an auspicious synergy of benign synergies."
-Wikipedia article "Metadesign", under the heading "The Importance of Languaging"
How can meta-design apply to the average person creating a piece of software or a web environment? We looked at the definition of meta-design on Wikipedia, which is the first place most people will look when trying to understand something about meta-design. As can be seen above, the article is hard to understand and not very helpful to someone who is not thoroughly familiar with the field of human centered computing. One of the problems with understanding meta-design is that many of the current definitions are verbose and full of technical jargon. While these definitions usually have lots of useful information, it is hard for average users or designers to understand and apply this information to their own environments. We realize that, realistically, the people who are creating meta-design sites will generally not have a lot of background in this area. They will be people who have goals and ideas that, while not in the field of human centered computing, may benefit from some knowledge of the principles of meta-design. The current definitions do not involve examples or comparisons between real environments. Therefore, we believe there is a need for an accessible definition that is easy to understand and use. Ideally, anyone could read our definition and get a good idea of how and when to use or not use meta-design techniques to make the most of what they are designing.

7.2.) Relationship of your Project to the Themes discussed in the Course

Existing Definition of Meta-Design for Products
The involvement of designers and users in conventional design of a product is separate over time. Traditionally, the designers and users were separated at two extremities so that the creation of the product only involved designers and users only used the product after it was released (see figure 1 a). Over time, there may be shifts in human behavior within society that require a more useful product so designers will eventually meet again to make a better product.

8.) Characterization of the Individual Contributions

9.) Findings and Results (indicate specifically the aspect of the project you are most proud of)

9.1.) Conclusions

10. References (do not only provide a list at the end — but link to them from your document text where you indicate why this reference is important)

"Metadesign." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadesign . 9 December 2010.

Fischer, Gerhard. "Extending Boundaries with Meta-Design and Cultures of Participation." http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/2010/nordichi-paper.pdf . Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, University of Colorado at Boulder, Fall 2010. 10 October 2010.

Fischer, Gerhard, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick. Lecture 5: "Less is More: Human Computer Interaction and High-Functionality Applications." http://xwiki.cs.colorado.edu/bin/download/HCCF2010/Lecture 5/L5-buxton-less-is-more-Sept13.pdf . Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, University of Colorado at Boulder, Fall 2010. 26 September 2010.

Fischer, Gerhard, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick. Lecture 8: "Design Methodologies." http://xwiki.cs.colorado.edu/bin/download/HCCF2010/Lecture 8/L8-design-method-sept22.pdf . Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, University of Colorado at Boulder, Fall 2010. 10 October 2010.

Fischer, Gerhard, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick. "Lecture 9: Meta-Design: A Framework for the Future of End-User Development." http://xwiki.cs.colorado.edu/bin/download/HCCF2010/Lecture 9/L9-meta-design-sept27.pdf . Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, University of Colorado at Boulder, Fall 2010 . 28 September 2010.

Fischer, Gerhard, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick. Lecture 10: "The Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, Reseeding (SER) Model." http://xwiki.cs.colorado.edu/bin/download/HCCF2010/Lecture 10/L10-SER-Sept29.pdf . Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, University of Colorado at Boulder, Fall 2010. 10 October 2010.

Fischer, Gerhard, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick. Lecture 11: "Cultures of Participation." http://xwiki.cs.colorado.edu/bin/download/HCCF2010/Lecture 11/L11-cultures-of-part-Oct4.pdf . Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, University of Colorado at Boulder, Fall 2010. 10 October 2010.

Fischer, Gerhard, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick. Lecture 12: "Richer Ecology of Participation." http://xwiki.cs.colorado.edu/bin/download/HCCF2010/Lecture 12/L12-richer-ecologies.pdf . Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, University of Colorado at Boulder, Fall 2010. 10 October 2010.