Meta-design: design for designers

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 high-tech 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.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Management, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
consumer and designer mindsets, designing “out of the box”, domain-oriented design environments, evolutionary growth, impact of new media on design, open evolvable systems, open source, reseeding model, seeding, underdesigned systems