Meta-design

Abstract

One fundamental challenge for the design of the interactive systems of the future is to invent and design environments and cultures in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Unfortunately, a large number of new media are designed from a perspective of viewing and treating humans primarily as consumers. The possibility for humans to be and act as designers (in cases in which they desire to do so) should be accessible not only to a small group of "hightech scribes," but rather to all interested individuals and groups. Meta-design characterizes activities, processes, and objectives to create new media and environments that allow users to act as designers and be creative.In this paper we discuss problems addressed by our research on meta-design, provide a conceptual framework for meta-design, and illustrate our developments in the context of a particular system, the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory. KeywordsConsumer and designer mindsets; designing "out of the box," domain-oriented design environments; open evolvable systems; Open Source; seeding, evolutionary growth, reseeding model; impact of new media on design; underdesigned systems.

“Creatures of habit”: influential factors to the adoption of computer personalization and accessibility settings

“…Through this customization, the end-user is able to adapt their system to any unpredictable future needs that may arise that were not planned for by the professional designer when the system was first created. People benefit from meta-design features because it makes the system more adaptable for unknown use cases that cannot adequately be planned or designed for in advance [84][85][86][87]. As such, systems with meta-design features are designed to be intentionally flexible, support personalization, and evolve with an individual's needs as they arise.…”

Seven observations and research questions about Open Design and Open Source Hardware

“…That is, designing product meta-models allowing to generate numerous variants instead of designing one single product. Fischer & Scharff (2000) define meta-design as 'activities, processes and objectives to create new media and environments that allow users to act as designers and be creative'. Kyriakou, Nickerson, & Sabnis (2017) define metamodels as 'information to generate a range of related models, a family of designs'.…”

App Movement

“…Research regarding design focused participation online attempts to overcome these issues of technical expertise requirements. Fischer et al [6] define meta-design as a series of "activities, processes, and objects to create new media and environments that allow users to adopt the role of designers". Fischer et al [6] express that non-designers (consumers of technology) should be able to influence the design of the systems they utilize and that we as system designers should in fact design to enable these forms of interactions.…”

“…Fischer et al [6] define meta-design as a series of "activities, processes, and objects to create new media and environments that allow users to adopt the role of designers". Fischer et al [6] express that non-designers (consumers of technology) should be able to influence the design of the systems they utilize and that we as system designers should in fact design to enable these forms of interactions. However [6] argue that the role of a designer must be thought of as a spectrum ranging from passive consumer to meta-designer, and that design focused systems should be developed to enable varying levels of collaborative participation.…”

“…Fischer et al [6] express that non-designers (consumers of technology) should be able to influence the design of the systems they utilize and that we as system designers should in fact design to enable these forms of interactions. However [6] argue that the role of a designer must be thought of as a spectrum ranging from passive consumer to meta-designer, and that design focused systems should be developed to enable varying levels of collaborative participation. An attempt to include communities within the process of research itself can be seen in the design of Citizen Science platforms wherein researchers commission a community of willing citizens to collect scientific data at scale and under the direction of scientists.…”