Information Technology Reference
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activities that cannot be generalized or adapted
and evolved.
We discuss a methodology to develop Web
applications that do not fall in the Turing Tar Pit
or in its inverse. The methodology stems from
our experience in participatory design of several
applications devoted to end users. It requires that
a team of designers, including representatives of
end users, that we call domain experts, develop
and evolve an application to support professional
people in their work practice. Karasti says that
work practice consists of “unfolding activity in
actual communities that is concrete and
situated
,
complexly socially organized and technologically
mediated” (Karasti, 2001, p. 16). In their work
practice, professional people reason and com-
municate with each other through documents,
expressed using notations, which represent
abstract or concrete concepts, prescriptions,
and results of activities. Often, dialects arise in
a community, because the notation is used in
different practical situations and environments.
For example, mechanical drawings are organized
according to rules, which are different in Europe
and in the USA.
Professional people need to use computer
systems to perform their work tasks exploiting
all the communication and operation possibilities
offered by these systems, but they are not and do
not want to become computer experts. These end
users often complain about the systems they use,
and feel frustrated because of the difficulties they
encounter interacting with them.
Our approach to system development starts
from the observation of activities of domain
experts during their daily work. The research
we have developed in this field, and the experi-
ence gained has brought us to develop software
environments that support users in performing
activities in their specific domains, but also allow
them to tailor these environments for better adapt-
ing to their needs, and even to create or modify
software artifacts. The latter are defined activi-
ties of End-User Development (EUD), to which
a lot of attention is currently devoted by various
researchers in Europe and all over in the world
(Burnett, Cook, & Rothermel, 2004; Fischer &
Giaccardi, 2006; Myers, Hudson, & Randy, 2003;
Sutcliffe & Mehandjiev, 2004).
EUD can be considered a two-phase pro-
cess, the first phase being designing the design
environment, the second one being designing
the applications using the design environment.
These two phases are not clearly separated and
are executed several times in an interleaved way,
because the design environments evolve both as
a consequence of the progressive insights the dif-
ferent stakeholders gain into the design process
and as a consequence of the comments of end
users at work. Note that this two-phase process
requires a shift in the design paradigm, which
must move from user-centered and participatory
design to metadesign (Costabile, Fogli, Mussio, &
Piccinno, 2005; Fischer, Giaccardi, Ye, Sutcliffe,
& Mehandjiev, 2004). Through metadesign,
design environments can be created that permit
designing applications which can be evolved in
the hands of end users.
The chapter is organized as follows. It first
discusses EUD and the new design paradigm
called metadesign. Then it presents the method-
ological assumptions underlying our work. Next
it illustrates our (meta)design methodology and
suggests some refinement to the definition of
metadesign provided in the literature. Then it
describes the application of the methodology to
a project in the medical domain. Finally, a com-
parison with related works and the conclusions
are provided.
end user development and
metadesign
New technologies have created the potential to
overcome the traditional separation between end
users and software developers. New environments
able to seamlessly move from using software
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