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In this perspective, metadesign underlines a
novel vision of interactive systems that is at the
basis of our approach. All stakeholders of an
interactive system are “owners” of a part of the
problem and therefore they must all contribute to
system design. Moreover, co-evolution of users
and systems (Arondi, Baroni, Fogli, & Mussio,
2002; Bourguin et al., 2001; Costabile, Fogli, Mar-
cante, & Piccinno, 2006c) forces all stakeholders
in a continuous development of the system. This
can be carried out, on one hand, by end users,
who can perform tailoring activities to adapt the
software environments they use to their evolved
needs and habits. On the other hand, end users
should collaborate with all other stakeholders in
the evolution of the interactive system rather than
just in the design. For these reasons, stakeholders
need different software environments, specific to
their culture, knowledge, and abilities, through
which each stakeholder can contribute to shape
software artifacts. They should also exchange
among them the results of these activities, to
converge into a common design or evolve an
existing system.
Metadesign is a huge challenge in the current
software engineering scenario. Somebody even
thinks, for various reasons, that allowing end users
to perform design activities is a utopian idea. Ben
Shneiderman, introducing the Lieberman topic
on Programming by Example (Lieberman, 2001),
states that there is magic and power in creating
programs by direct manipulation activities, as
opposed to writing code. The 18th-century sci-
entists, such as Ben Franklin, experimented with
electricity and found its properties quite amazing.
Successively, Franklin and other scientists, such as
Michael Faraday, laid the foundation for Thomas
Edison's different applications, such as genera-
tors and electric lighting. Thus, in Shneiderman's
opinion, also in the field of Programming by Ex-
ample, there are a lot of researchers like Franklin
and Faraday who are laying the foundation for the
Thomas Edison still to come, but it is difficult at
the moment to tell which idea will trigger broad
dissemination or which insights will spark a new
industry.
On the other hand, some drawbacks can affect
EUD and metadesign: for example, if some situ-
ated practices of end users are inadequate, then
they are replicated in the software environment
obtained through EUD activities. However, end
users are the owners of the problems, and the end
user community is the referee of the adequacy
of the work practice. The approach proposed in
this chapter develops tools supporting end-user
work practice. These tools force end users to
externalize the decision process and to document
it through annotations. These annotations allow
a critical evaluation of the work practice by the
whole community. If the work practice of the
end user is inadequate within the professional
domain, the inadequacies are made evident by
the annotations and can be discussed at large by
the community.
methodologiCal assumptions
Following Schön (1983), we assume that end users
do perform their activity as competent practitio-
ners, in that “they exhibit a kind of knowing in
practice, most of which is tacit” and they “reveal
a capacity for reflection on their intuitive know-
ing in the midst of action and sometimes use this
capacity to cope with the unique, uncertain, and
conflicted situations of practice” (pp. 8-9).
Tacit knowledge
consists of habits and culture
that we do not recognize in ourselves, but which
can be used in performing our activities (Polanyi,
1967). End users, as competent practitioners, apply
their tacit knowledge if the current context and
the tools at hand support them to apply it.
Competent practitioners reason and commu-
nicate with each other through documents, ex-
pressed using notations, which represent abstract
or concrete concepts, prescriptions, and results
of activities. Such notations emerge from users'
practical experiences in their specific domain of
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