In a world that is not predictable, improvisation and evolution are more than a luxury: they are a necessity. The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of making it an opportunity for more creative and more sustainable solutions. User-centered and participatory design approaches have focused primarily on activities taking place at design time. These approaches have not given enough emphasis and they have provided few mechanisms to support systems as living entities that can evolve over time. Metadesign is a unique design approach concerned with opening up solution spaces rather than complete solutions (hence the prefix meta-), and aimed at creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. This approach extends the traditional notion of design beyond the original development of a system to include co-adaptive processes between users and systems that enable the users to act as designers in personally meaningful activities and be creative.

Lifelong learning is an essential challenge for inventing the future of our societies; it is a necessity rather than a possibility or a luxury to be considered. Lifelong learning is more than adult education or training --- it is a mindset and a habit for people to acquire. It creates the challenge to understand, explore, and support new dimensions of learning such as: (1) self-directed learning, (2) learning on demand, (3) informal learning, and (4) organizational learning. Lifelong learning requires a deeper understanding of the co-evolutionary processes between fundamental human activities and their relationships with new media. It requires an integration of new theories, innovative systems, practices, and assessment. New intellectual spaces, physical spaces, organizational forms, and reward structures need to be created to make lifelong learning an important part of human life. These new spaces and structures must support individuals, groups, and organizations who will engage in and experience them as innovators and risk takers, and will use their creativity and imagination to explore alternative ways of learning.

This paper develops an organization design-oriented conceptual model of scientific knowledge production through citizen science virtual organizations. Citizen science is a form of organization design for collaborative scientific research involving scientists and volunteers, for which Internet-based modes of participation enable massive virtual collaboration by thousands of members of the public. The conceptual model provides an example of a theory development process and discusses its application to an exploratory study. The paper contributes a multi-level process model for organizing investigation into the impact of design on this form of scientific knowledge production.

Design is a ubiquitous activity. People can be creative in any sphere of life pursuing design activities. For the last decade, we have been engaged in the development of domain-oriented design environments to enhance individual creativity in a variety of different design domains. Based on the fact that the individual human mind is limited, extensions to our earlier approaches are presented, describing conceptual frameworks and innovative systems in support of social creativity. The conceptual framework is grounded in distributed cognition, organizational learning, and organizational memories. Derived from this conceptual framework, requirements for computational environments supporting social creativity are described, including the necessity for open systems; the seeding, evolutionary growth and reseeding model; and new conceptualizations of the World Wide Web. Specific system components and applications illustrate the implications of these assumptions and requirements...

Based on the fact that the individual human mind is limited, conceptual frameworks and innovative systems in support of social interaction are a necessity rather than a luxury for our future information society. The conceptual frameworks need to be grounded in distributed cognition. Because "a group has no head", collaboratively constructed and evolved information repositories are of critical importance to support shared understanding, negotiation, critiquing, and organizational learning. Derived from this conceptual framework, requirements for computational environments supporting social interaction are described. Specific environments (e.g., domain-oriented design environments, organizational memories) illustrate the challenges of creating open, evolvable systems and of contextualizing information. The implications for social interaction (such as the need to allow users to be designers and active contributors , the critical importance of understanding social and motivational issues, ...

Abstract: This paper provides elements of a transformational conceptual framework for CSCL by focusing on how learning takes place when the answer is not known (this being the case for complex design problems in numerous domains encountered in lifelong learning activities). The paper postulates, explores, and discusses visions, theories, systems, practices, and methods for CSCL with a focus on reflective communities (bringing stakeholders together from many different backgrounds, requiring cultural and epistemological pluralism to make all voices heard), metadesign (allowing owners of problems to act as designers and active contributors, and not only as consumers), and social creativity (bringing different and often controversial points of view together to create a shared understanding among stakeholders that can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts). Innovative socio-technical environments are needed to make progress in achieving these objectives. Examples and characteristics of such environments will be briefly presented and discussed. Some implications and challenges for future research in CSCL are derived and articulated.

Complex design problems require more knowledge than any single person possesses because the knowledge relevant to a problem is usually distributed among stakeholders. Bringing different and often controversial points of view together to create a shared understanding among these stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. New media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and resolving complex design problems can extend the power of the individual human mind. Based on our past work and study of other approaches, systems, and collaborative and participatory processes, this paper identifies challenges we see as the limiting factors for future collaborative humancomputer systems. The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) is introduced as an integrated physical and computational environment addressing some of these challenges. The vision behind the EDC shifts future development away from the computer as the focal point, toward an emphasis that tries to improve our understanding of the human, social, and cultural system that creates the context for use. This work is based on new conceptual principles that include creating shared understanding among various stakeholders, contextualizing information to the task at hand, and creating objects-to-think-with in collaborative design activities. Although the EDC framework is applicable to

The history of the human race is one of increasing intellectual capability. Since the time of our early ancestors, our brains have gotten no bigger; nevertheless, there has been a steady accretion of new tools for intellectual work (including advanced visual interfaces) and an increasing distribution of complex activities among many minds. Despite this transcendence of human cognition beyond what is “inside ” a person’s head, most studies and frameworks on cognition have disregarded the social, physical, and artifactual surroundings in which cognition and human activity take place. Distributed intelligence provides an effective theoretical framework for understanding what humans can achieve and how artifacts and tools can be designed and evaluated to empower human beings and to change tasks. This paper presents and discusses the conceptual frameworks and systems that we have developed over the last decade to create effective socio-technical environments supporting distributed intelligence.

The first decade of the World Wide Web predominantly enforced a clear separation between designers and consumers. New technological developments, such as the cyberinfrastructure and Web 2.0 architectures, have emerged to support a participatory Web and social computing. These developments are the foundations for a fundamental shift from consumer cultures (specialized in producing finished goods to be consumed passively) to cultures of participation (in which all people are provided with the means to participate actively in personally meaningful activities). End-user development and meta-design provide foundations for this fundamental transformation. They explore and support new approaches for the design, adoption, appropriation, adaptation, evolution, and sharing of artifacts by all participating stakeholders. They take into account that cultures of participation are not dictated by technology alone: they are the result of incremental shifts in human behavior and social organizations. The design, development, and assessment of five particular applications that contributed to the development of our theoretical framework are described and discussed.

This thesis proposes the creation of a scalable architecture to support the access and creation of Location Linked Information--- the coupling of physical location with arbitrary virtual information nuggets. The proposed system dynamically links a physical space/time moment with a distributed database containing information that describes that moment's surroundings. This hybrid virtual/physical space, called glean space, is owned, managed, and rated by the public, for the benefit of the populace. Imagined as initially being embodied by an interactive, dynamic map viewed on a handheld computer, the system provides two functions for its urban users: 1) the retrieval of information about their surroundings, and 2) the optional annotation of location for communal benefit. It is our hypothesis that Location Linked Information will enhance the urban experience, just as access to transportation dramatically altered the sensation and form of the city. By making inhabitants hyper-aware of their surroundings, they get the benefits of a small town citizen (omniscience of space and society) while possibly being situated in a much larger megalopolis with the social mobility and features that go with it. MOTIVATION The city of bits forgot about its atoms As ubiquitous computing moves from theory to practice, the once-clear demarcation between the virtual and the real worlds is increasingly difficult to visualize, especially when visiting real-world mainstays such as urban streets. The deployment of wireless networking technologies such as Wi-Fi and GPRS in these outdoor arenas is accelerating the permeation of digital data