Complex design problems often cannot be solved by individuals or by homogenous groups. Communities of interest (CoIs) (defined by their collective concern with the resolution of a problem) bring together stakeholders from different communities of practice (CoP). Reaching a common understanding between these stakeholders is a major challenge due to the "symmetry of ignorance" caused by their respective cultures and their use of different knowledge systems. Our research has focused on the development of conceptual frameworks and innovative socio-technical environments to exploit the "symmetry of ignorance" as a source for social creativity among CoIs. Gerhard Fischer 2 IRIS'24, Norway 1

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 metadesign, and illustrate our developments in the context of a particular system, the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory.

Open source communities have successfully developed a great deal of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability.

Abstract not found

Complex design problems require more knowledge than any one single person can possess, and the knowledge relevant to a problem is often distributed and controversial. Rather than being a limiting factor, symmetry of ignorance can provide the foundation for social creativity. Bringing different points of view together and trying to create a shared understanding among all stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. Social creativity can be supported by new media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and solving these problems. These new media need to be designed from a meta-design perspective by creating environments in which stakeholders can act as designers and be more than consumers. Keywords conceptual frameworks for creativity and cognition, consumers, designers, impact of new media on design, meta-design, social creativity, symmetry of ignorance Gerhard Fischer 2 KBS Special Issues C&C99 INTRODUCTION______________________________________...

The evolution and enhancement of features during system evolution can have significant effects on its coherence as well as its internal architecture. Studying the evolution of system features and concepts across a product line from an external or problem domain perspective can inform the process of identifying and designing future features. We show how we derive three primary views, morphological, functional, and an object view, from the user-level structures and operations of a system, using a case study of Microsoft Word's evolution. We show how these views illustrate feature evolution over three versions of Word. Lastly we discuss the lessons learned from our study of feature evolution. 1.

This paper presents a Reuse based Software Development Environment that provides support to Component-Based software Development (CBD) within certain domains, named Odyssey. Object-oriented frameworks, software architectures, artificial intelligence techniques, domain engineering, , and mediators are some of the technologies used by Odyssey.

Abstract: Our research on knowledge management is rooted in the community perspective. We believe that knowledge systems should serve primarily to help people create and share new knowledge. But we also acknowledge the role of stable, structured and reliable information, both as a component of our systems and as a component of the organizations within which we work. The contribution of the paper is a framework for integrating organizational and community perspectives on knowledge management and its computational support. Our basic idea is that knowledge is not a static chunk of information, but rather, knowledge evolves in a cycle of knowledge liquidization and crystallization. The evolving process takes place through the interactions among conceptual worlds, representational worlds, and the real world. This paper first describes the knowledge liquidization and crystallization framework. We then illustrate the approach with three systems, Knowledge Nebula Crystallizer, livingOM, and ART-SHTA.

Experience-based approaches to software development promise to capture critical knowledge from software projects that can be used as a basis for continuous improvement of software development practices. Putting these ideas into practice in the quickly evolving discipline of software engineering has proven elusive. Techniques and tools are needed that help software practitioners apply past knowledge to current projects while engaging in knowledge creation processes. This paper outlines the experience factory and organizational learning approaches, both of which explore how experience-based approaches to software development can be used to improve software development practices. A software tool is used to investigate how these two approaches can be integrated to create an approach that addresses many issues of knowledge

Individualized feedback is an important factor in fostering effective learning. It is, however, often not seen in schools because providing it places a significant additional workload on teachers. One way to solve this problem is to employ critiquing systems. Critiquing systems, however, require significant development effort before they can be put into use. In this paper, we describe an incremental approach that facilitates the development of educational critiquing systems by integrating manual critiquing with critique authoring. As a result of the integration, the development of critiquing systems becomes an evolutionary process. We describe a system that we built, the Java Critiquer, as an exemplar of our model. Results from a pilot test and real-life usage of the system have shown that the system successfully provides a setting for accumulating critiques and at the same time supporting teachers in critiquing student code.