Back to the future of EUD: The logic of bricolage for the paving of EUD roadmaps

Abstract

Several recent approaches to EUD increasingly recognize an active role of the users in the construction of the tools supporting their daily practices. However, there is still a lack of a general framework that could play a role in the comparison of existing proposals and in the development of new EUD solutions. The paper proposes a conceptual framework and a related architecture, called Logic of Bricolage, that aims to be a step further in this direction. The framework is described and the architecture instantiated in three concrete EUD environments (the development of a document based application, the integration of existing applications and the construction of mashups) to show its generality and applicability. The concluding remarks point to the potential value of this formalization effort in the EUD field.