Meta-design: A Framework for the Future of End-User Development

Abstract

In a world that is not predictable, improvistion, evolution, and innovation are more than a luxury: they are a necessity. The challend of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of including it and making it an opportunity for more creative and more adeqaute solutions to problems. Meta-design is an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating social and technical infrastructure in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. It extends the traditional notion of systems design beyong the original development of a system to include a co-adpative process between users and a system, in which the users and problems cannot be completely anticipated at design time, when a system is developed. Users at use time, will discover mismatches will lead to breakdowns that serve as potential sources of new insights, new knowledge, and new understanding. This paper is structured in four parts: conceptual framework, environmens, applications, and fidings and challenges. Aloong the structure of the paper, we discuss and explore the following essential components of meta-deisgn, providing requirements, guidelines, and models for the future of end user development: (1) the relationship of meta-design to other design methodologies; (2) the seeding, Evolutionary growth, reseeding (SER) Model, a process model for large evolving design artifacts; (3)the characteristics of unselfconscious cultures of deisgn, their strengths and their weaknesses, and the necessity for owners of problems to be empowered to engage in end-user development; (4) the possibilities created by meta-design to bring co-creation alive; and (5) the need for an intergrated design space that brings together a technical infrastructure that is evolvable, for the design of learning envirenments and work organizations that allow end-users to become active contributors, and for the design of relational settings in which users can relate, find motivations and rewards, and accumulate social capital.