Meta-Design: Putting Owners of Problems in Charge

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Meta-Design: Putting Owners of Problems in Charge.

Gerhard Fischer University of Colorado

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Citation Fischer, G. (2004) Meta-Design: Putting Owners of Problems in Charge., in Redmond, J., Durling, D. and de Bono, A (eds.), Futureground - DRS International Conference 2004, 17-21 November, Melbourne, Australia. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2004/researchpapers/1

This Research Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Conference Proceedings at DRS Digital Library. It has been accepted for inclusion in DRS Biennial Conference Series by an authorized administrator of DRS Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Meta-Design: Putting Owners of Problems in Charge.

Gerhard Fischer Objectives of the Research

University of Colorado • Many design approaches force all the design intelligence to the earliest part of the design process, when everyone knows the least about what is really needed. The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of including it and making it an opportunity. • Meta-Design creates open, evolvable systems which address the limitations associated with closed systems. Open systems allow significant modifications when the need arises. The evolution that takes place through modifications by the owners of problems is a “first class design activity.” • Meta-design creates unself-conscious cultures of design (C Alexander) which allow owners of problems to respond to errors and breakdowns thereby turning them into active learners and designers rather than passive consumers or victims.

The Approach or Method Used • Meta-design is a design methodology focused on creating new media that allow users to act as designers and be creative; it thereby supports co-creation. • Meta-design transcends: professionally-dominated design which works only for people with the same interests and background knowledge; user-centered design which analyze the needs of the users and understand the conceptual worlds of the users; and, participatory design which involve users more deeply in the process as co-designers by empowering them to propose and generate design alternatives. • All of these design methodologies suffer from the limitation that they focus on system development at design time by bringing developers and users together to envision the contexts of use whereas meta-design allows design activities take place at use time. • To support meta-design as a design methodology, we have develop a process model called “seeding, evolutionary growth, reseeding”.

An Indication of the Nature of the Main Findings • Meta-designers: use their own creativity to create socio-technical environments in which other people can be creative; and, create the technical and social conditions for broad participation in design activities which are as important as creating the artifact itself. • Unself-conscious cultures of design supported by meta-design put owners of problems in charge and thereby facilitate the incremental improvement of artifacts through a continuous very-small-feedback-loop adaptation. • Meta-design integrates the world of prediction (world-as-imagined) and the world of reality (world-as-experienced); this is important because planning, anticipating, and delegating that have to take account of all possibilities is impossible in all but the simplest tasks. • Meta-Design is a design methodology which has the potential to transform many application areas, including: system design (customization, personalization, tailorability, end-user development, open source and open systems, living systems); architectural design (underdesign, support for “unself-conscious culture of design”); teaching and learning (teachers as facilitator, learning communities, courses-as-seeds, self-directed learning, the emergent is a necessity); and, interactive art (collaboration, co-creation, put the tools rather than the object of design in the hands of users).

84 Meta-Design: Putting Owners of Problems in Charge

Abstract Meta-Design creates open, evolvable systems addressing the limitations associated with closed systems. Open systems allow significant modifications when the need arises. These needs are experienced by the users of the system who are the owners of the problems. Meta-design creates and supports unself-conscious cultures of design that allow owners of problems to respond to errors and breakdowns. This allows them to act as active designers rather than passive consumers. Capturing the modifications (either as new content or tool functionality) will contribute to the evolution of systems and increase their fit and value. This paper presents dimensions of a conceptual framework for meta-design and system developments illustrating this approach.

Introduction Our research over the last decade has explored conceptual frameworks and socio-technical environments that guide the efficient design and development of digital artifacts by computer users who are not professionally educated software engineers but spend a great portion of their time creating software systems for their own work. By putting owners of problems in charge [Fischer, 1994b] and helping them to be independent of high-tech scribes, meta-design will empower millions of computer users to create personally meaningful software by opening up the creation and evolution of software to a population much larger than software professionals.

Empowering Owners of Problems Computing needs to be de-professionalized [Illich, 1973]. The monopoly of highly trained computing professionals acting as “high-tech scribes” should be eliminated just as the monopoly of the scribes was eliminated during the reformation in Europe. This does not mean that there is no place for professional programmers and system designers in the future [National-Research-Council, 2003], but one of the most important objectives of the professional computing community should be to create systems which will put owners of problems in charge [Fischer, 1994b]. Achieving the goal of putting problem owners in charge is not only a technical problem, but also a considerable social effort. If the most important role for computation in the future is to provide people with a powerful medium for expression, then the medium should support them in working on the task, rather than requiring them to focus their intellectual resources on the medium itself. Depending on the ratio of computer knowledge to domain knowledge, software systems can be created either by delegation to professional software developers, or through the tight collaboration of domain experts and professional software developers, or mainly just by domain experts.

1 Software systems that require relatively little domain knowledge can be delegated to professional software developers after the domain experts have identified the requirements and handed the development task to them. This process exploits the strength of the division of labor [Brown & Duguid, 2000], in which software developers and domain experts work in their own professional domains and concentrate on what they know and do best. This approach, however, only works in the cases where the problems are well defined and the requirements can be well understood and clearly expressed in advance of the development of the systems. When the requirements can be only partially understood or defined previous to the construction of the system, professional software developers need to work in close collaboration with domain experts (a system design methodology pursued in participatory design approaches [Schuler & Namioka, 1993]). Most complex problems are ill-defined problems [Rittel & Webber, 1984] that cannot be delegated because they require the integration of problem framing and problem solving [Rittel, 1984], making it impossible to define requirements in advance. Ill-defined problems require that the “back-talk” [Nakakoji, 1997; Schön, 1992] of a problem goes to the owners of the problem helping them iteratively to gain a deeper understanding of the problem during the process of constructing the solution. Domain experts use computers to create solutions to the problems they own and that are meaningful to them. Whereas computer scientists find computers intrinsically interesting and programmers like computers because they get to program, domain experts regard computers merely as useful, sometimes even indispensable machines that are capable of helping them work on their problems more productively, creatively, and with greater pleasure [Nardi, 1993; National-Research-Council, 2003]. Domain experts representing owners of problems are not novices, or naive users. They are people who have computational needs and use computers by choice and over extended periods of time. Due to their lack of interest in computers per se and lack of training in software development, they often develop software systems in an ad hoc way without appropriate knowledge about software engineering principles and methodologies. They are not interested in becoming professional software developers; for them, software systems are means, not ends, and they have neither the desire nor the time to become professional software engineers. Empowering owners of problems is important but many software design problems transcend the individual human mind, and require collaboration from different minds because knowledge is distributed across domains and individuals [Arias et al., 2000; Bennis & Biederman, 1997; John-Steiner, 2000].

Metadesign Meta-design [Fischer & Giaccardi, 2004] is an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. It extends the traditional notion of system design beyond the original development and allows owners of problems to become co-designers [Henderson & Kyng, 1991]. It is grounded in the basic

2 assumption that future uses and problems cannot be completely anticipated at design time, when a system is developed. Users, at use time, will discover mismatches between their needs and the support that an existing system can provide for them. These mismatches will lead to breakdowns that serve as potential sources of new insights, new knowledge, and new understanding. In a world that is not predictable, improvisation, evolution, and innovation are more than luxuries: they are necessities. The challenge 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 adequate solutions to problems. Many design approaches force all the design intelligence to the earliest part of the design process, when everyone knows the least about what is really needed [Brand, 1995]. Meta-design is a conceptual framework in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. For most of the design domains that we have studied over many years (e.g., urban design, software design, design of learning environments, and interactive art) the knowledge to understand, frame, and solve problems is not given, but is constructed and evolved during the problem-solving process. Unself-conscious and Self-conscious Design Cultures. The theory of unself- conscious and self-conscious design cultures [Alexander, 1964] provides an initial analytical framework for gaining a systematic understanding of meta-design approaches. In a self-conscious design culture, designers create designs and artifacts for people other than themselves; in an unself-conscious design culture, designers create designs and artifacts for themselves and to solve problems of their own. Table 1 summarizes the major distinctions between the two cultures. Methodology. Meta-design is a design methodology focused on creating new media that allow users to act as designers and be creative; it thereby supports co-creation. Meta-design transcends (1) professionally-dominated design which works only for people with the same interests and background knowledge; (2) user-centered design which analyze the needs of users and understands the conceptual world of the users; and (3) participatory design which involve users more deeply in the process as co-designers by empowering them to propose and generate design alternatives. All of these design methodologies suffer from the limitation that they focus on system development at design time by bringing developers and users together to envision the contexts of use whereas meta- design allows design activities to take place at use time. To support meta-design as a design methodology, we have developed the seeding, evolutionary growth, reseeding model [Fischer & Ostwald, 2002].

Table 1: Comparing Self-conscious and Unself-conscious Cultures of Design self-conscious unself-conscious definition an explicit, externalized description of a process of slow adaptation and error design exists (theoretical knowledge) reduction (situated knowledge) original professionally dominated design, design for primitive societies, handmade things, association others design for self primary goal solve problems of others solve own problems

3 examples designed cities (Brasilia, Canberra); naturally grown cities (London, Paris); Microsoft Windows Linux strengths activities can be delegated; division of many small improvements; artifacts labor becomes possible well suited to their function; copes with ill-defined problems weaknesses many artifacts are ill-suited to the job no general theories exist or can be expected of them studied (because the activity is not externalized) requirements externalized descriptions must exist owners of problems must be involved because they have relevant, unarticulated knowledge evaluation high production value; efficient process; personally meaningful; pleasant and criteria robust; reliable engaging experience; self-expression relation with context required for the framing of the both problem framing and solving take context problem place within the bigger context

Meta-design will benefit from the following developments: to offer task-specific languages that take advantage of existing user knowledge among domain professionals [National-Research-Council, 2003] and to hide low-level computational details as much as possible from users (see Figure 2); to provide programming environments [Lieberman, 2001] that make the functionality of the system transparent and accessible so that the computational drudgery required of users can be substantially reduced; to support customization, reuse, and redesign effectively [Morch, 1997; Ye & Fischer, 2002]; and to exploit the power of collaboration [Arias et al., 2000; Nardi, 1993].

Application Areas This section briefly describes developments that were inspired by meta-design and in return contributed to our understanding of meta-design. In addition to the three applications briefly described below, we have explored and analyzed meta- design approaches in learning and teaching by developing the concept of courses-as-seeds [dePaula et al., 2001] and open source developments [Fischer et al., 2003; Raymond & Young, 2001; Scharff, 2002].

Domain-Oriented Design Environments Domain-oriented design environments [Fischer, 1994a] support meta-design by advancing human-computer interaction to human problem-domain interaction. Because systems are modeled at a conceptual level with which users are familiar, the interaction mechanisms take advantage of existing user knowledge and make the functionality of the system transparent and accessible. Thus, the computational drudgery required of users can be substantially reduced. Figure 1 shows an example of a domain-oriented design environment in the area of computer network design, including the following components:

4 a web-based information repository in which design rationale and general design issues can be stored (pane 1); a palette of components (pane 2); a work area in which new designs can be developed (pane 3); a specification component to define additional design requirements (pane (4); and a catalog of completed design to be used for redesign (pane 5).

(4) (1)

(3) (2) (5)

Figure 1: A Domain-Oriented Design Environment for Computer Network Design

Figure 2 illustrates a layered architecture in support of human problem-domain interaction. This architecture allows domain designers to engage in end-user development by describing their problems with the concepts of a design environment rather than with low-level computer abstractions [Girgensohn, 1992].

5 Programming Design Languages Assembly Problem Environments Languages Domains

Computer User

Domain Environment Compiler Designer Developer Developer Figure 2: A Layered Architecture Supporting Human Problem-Domain Interaction

The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory [Arias et al., 2000] is a second- generation design environment focused on the support of collaborative design by integrating physical and computational components to encourage and facilitate informed participation by all users in the design process. It represents a research effort that created an open system (following the process of the seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding process model) to address some of the shortcomings of closed systems. It supports users in collaborative design (see Figure 3) in creating externalizations [Bruner, 1996] by assisting users in translating vague mental conceptualizations of ideas into more concrete representations; by facilitating a “conversation with the materials” of the design problem [Schön, 1983]; and by focusing discussions upon relevant aspects of the framing and understanding the problem being studied, thereby providing a concrete grounding and a common language among users [Clark & Brennan, 1991].

Figure 3: The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory

Interactive Art Interactive art, conceptualized as meta-design [Giaccardi, 2003], focuses on collaboration and co-creation. Interactive art is based on the premise that computational media allow people to operate at the sources of the creative process, and that this creativity can be shared and no longer limited to the realm of professional artists. Therefore, interactive art puts the tools rather than the object of design in the hands of users. It creates interactive systems that do not define content and processes, but rather the conditions for the process of interaction. Artistic practices based on the interactive and participatory use of networked technologies adopted meta-design as a term for an alternative design approach since the beginning of the 1980s [Fischer & Giaccardi, 2004]. One of the most significant practices of meta-design in the field of interactive art is the Electronic Café project (see Figure 4) (1984; http://www.ecafe.com/). The Electronic Café is a flexible, end-user modifiable, and visual components-based system.

Figure 4: The Electronic Café Project

Findings Meta-designers use their own creativity to create socio-technical environments in which other people can be creative. They define the technical and social conditions for broad participation in design activities which are as important as creating the artifact itself. Unself-conscious cultures of design supported by meta-design put owners of problems in charge and thereby facilitate the incremental improvement of artifacts through a continuous small feedback loop adaptation. Meta-design integrates the world of prediction and the world of reality [Suchman, 1987]; this is important because planning, anticipating, and delegating all future possibilities is impossible in all but the simplest tasks. Meta-design needs to pay attention to the trade-off between improvisations versus standardization. It is a design methodology which has the potential to transform many application areas, including: software design, architectural design, teaching and learning, and interactive art. Meta-design is more than a technical problem: it addresses the challenges of creating new mindsets, new sources of creativity, cultures changes, and innovative societies. It has the potential to create a culture in which all participants in collaborative design processes can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities.

Acknowledgements The author thanks the members of the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design at the University of Colorado who have made major contributions to the conceptual framework and systems described in this paper. Special thanks to Elisa Giaccardi who has

8 influenced our meta-design framework from an interactive art perspective; and Yunwen Ye who has analyzed the relationship between meta-design and open source developments. The research was supported by (1) the National Science Foundation, Grants (a) REC- 0106976 “Social Creativity and Meta-Design in Lifelong Learning Communities”, and (b) CCR-0204277 “A Social-Technical Approach to the Evolutionary Construction of Reusable Software Component Repositories”; (2) SRA Key Technology Laboratory, Inc., Tokyo, Japan; (3) the Coleman Institute, Boulder, CO.

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