Meta-Design, Participative Software Systems, and Web Contribution - Daniela Fogli Dipartimento di Elettronica per l’Automazione Università degli Studi di Brescia - Italy L3D Symposium Summer 2006

Daniela Fogli - L3D Symposium Summer 20062/9 Three (related) questions What do we mean by “meta-design” of participative systems ? What does motivate people to participate in software design ? Is it inevitable that desktop software will be replaced by web applications ?

Daniela Fogli - L3D Symposium Summer 20063/9 Meta-Design “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” [Fischer 2006] … users as designers … But, what do we mean by “design”? Design (new) interaction experiences (e.g. EDC)? Design sw tools supporting some daily tasks (e.g. MAPS)? I am interested in the second perspective First, it is a software engineering challenge (but software engineers may be annoyed about that!)

Daniela Fogli - L3D Symposium Summer 20064/9 Collaboration about goals and collaboration about design “when double-loop systems collaborate to create new systems, they engage in design” [Pangaro 2005] “when double-loop systems interact with other double-loop systems for the same goals, they collaborate with each other” [Pangaro 2005] possibly a new PS

Daniela Fogli - L3D Symposium Summer 20065/9 Not only a technical problem The technical problem is hard but… … there is also the “social” problem What does motivate people to participate in software design/development? I consider “people” as non software experts, but domain experts… so in some way I do not consider Open Source and similar domains

Daniela Fogli - L3D Symposium Summer 20066/9 What does motivate people to participate in software design/development? New work organizations require users to be engaged in design: we experienced this in the medical domain and in the mechanical engineering domain - developing the Software Shaping Workshop (SSW) methodology M. F. Costabile, D. Fogli, R. Lanzilotti, P. Mussio, A. Piccinno, Supporting Work Practice through End User Development Environments, Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, 18(4), 2006, D. Fogli, A. Piccinno, Environments to support context and emotion aware visual interaction, International Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 16 (2005), M. F. Costabile, D. Fogli, G. Fresta, P. Mussio, A. Piccinno, Software Environments for End- User Development and Tailoring, Psychnology, 2(1), 2004, Some particular domains ask for users participation: e.g. MAPS Other motivations: Success, money: small companies creating their own web site or e- commerce application (avoiding outsourcing…) Satisfaction from design experience: e.g. in digital arts, game design…

Daniela Fogli - L3D Symposium Summer 20067/9 How to substain participation On one hand the “environment” requires users to participate, on the other hand users are not expert in software design and development and may be scared by that or not interested in… It is something like “going beyond usability”: some years ago, non expert users had to learn to use some kind of software, now they must learn to design their own software So the design task should be… easy to learn and to do??? And what does it mean? Creating specialized support tools? E.g. MAPS, SSWs Design by scripting, direct manipulation, … ? … ??? Do we need to find a general approach driving the creation of specialized tools ?

Daniela Fogli - L3D Symposium Summer 20068/9 Which kind of tools/applications? Is it inevitable that desktop software will be replaced by web applications?… maybe yes … Web applications better support Collaboration Distributed Knowledge Distributed Intelligence Let’s think about daily work: who is able to perform his tasks in isolation and without knowledge and information coming from outside? New technologies, such as AJAX, may help overcoming current web limitations: web applications may become as rich as local PC- based ones, but distributed and more “plastic”

Daniela Fogli - L3D Symposium Summer 20069/9 An interesting paper: Letondal, C., Mackay, W. E. Participatory Programming and the Scope of Mutual Responsibility: Balancing scientific, design and software commitment, PDC 2004 “MetaDesign approach attempts to empower users by enabling them to act as designers at use-time, using domain-oriented rather than full programming languages” Participatory design at Institut Pasteur, Paris, involving three groups of experts: biologists, primarily users of software tools, not programmers, but who must either adapt or create software that allows them to address individual biological research questions bioinformaticians who have formal training in both biology and computer science computer scientists, not trained in biology, who design and distribute general-purpose tools to support biologists Leads to Participatory programming as a logical extension of participatory design, in which users participate in the creation of software tools they can ultimately tailor and program themselves