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end users, are customized to the user community
to which they are devoted, speak user languages,
and present all and only the tools necessary in that
context for developing further workshops.
the only ones who can guarantee the usability
and the performance of the system.
The SSW methodology offers to each stake-
holder a software environment, a Software Shap-
ing Workshop, by which the stakeholder can test
and study a software artifact and contribute to its
shaping and reshaping as any object or tool that
can be easily created, manipulated, and modified.
HCI experts, software engineers, and users acting
as developers, each through his or her SSW, can
access, test, and modify the system of interest
according to his or her own culture, experience,
needs, and skills. They can also exchange the
results of these activities to converge to a com-
mon design.
In the light of these considerations, metadesign
is a design paradigm that includes end users as
active members of the design team and provides
all the stakeholders in the team with suitable
languages and tools to foster their personal and
common reasoning about the development of
interactive software systems that support end
users' work .
End users must be in the situation to act as
designers when they need and to act as end users
when the tools match their needs. This twofold
role of end users is discussed also by Fischer
(2002), where he argues about the “consumer”
and “designer” perspectives by saying “that the
same person is and wants to be a consumer in
some situations and in others a designer; there-
fore 'consumer/designer' is not an attribute of a
person, but of a context” (p. 6).
Overall, the development of a system support-
ing the work practice in a specific domain of ap-
plication results into the development of a network
of system and application workshops. The design
team is engaged in a continuous development of
the system. This continuous development is car-
ried out, on one hand, by end users of application
workshops, who can perform a tailoring activity
adapting the application workshops they use to
their own needs and habits; on the other hand, all
other stakeholders participate in system evolution,
Refining metadesign
Metadesign emerges from the practice of Com-
puter Science, in particular from what is now
called end-user development (Lieberman, Paternò,
& Wulf, 2006). As already mentioned, recently a
definition of metadesign has been given in Fischer
et al. (2004):
Meta-design characterizes objectives, techniques,
and processes for creating new media and envi-
ronments allowing “owners of problems” (that
is, end users) to act as designers. A fundamental
objective of meta-design is to create socio-techni-
cal environments that empower users to engage
actively in the continuous development of systems
rather than being restricted to the use of existing
systems. (p. 35)
In Fischer and Giaccardi (2006), the authors
add that metadesign can be regarded “as an emerg-
ing conceptual framework aimed at defining and
creating social and technical infrastructures in
which new forms of collaborative design can take
place” (p. 427).
We refine and clarify herein these definitions
on the basis of our experimental activities.
End users are indeed the “owners of problems”,
and have a domain-oriented view of the processes
to be automatized. Moreover, they are not expert
in HCI or software engineering, so they can act
as designers contributing their experience on the
domain of activity. In turn, software engineers
have the knowledge about tools and techniques
for system development, and the HCI experts have
the knowledge on system usability and human
behavior. HCI experts and software engineers are
stakeholders whose contribution is necessary to
the development of the system because they are
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