HIVE-MIND SPACE: A META-DESIGN APPROACH FOR CULTIVATING AND SUPPORTING COLLABORATIVE DESIGN.
Creators: name: ZHU, LI
Publisher: name: Universit� degli Studi di Milano
Year: 2012

description: The ever-growing complexity of design projects requires more knowledge than any individual can have and, therefore, needs the active engagement of all stakeholders in the design process. Collaborative design exploits synergies from multidisciplinary communities, encourages divergent thinking, and enhances social creativity.
The research documented in this thesis supports and deepens the understanding of collaborative design in two dimensions: (1) It developed and evaluated socio-technical systems to support collaborative design projects; and (2) It defined and explored a meta- design framework focused on how these systems enable users, as active contributors, to modify and further develop them.
The research is grounded in and simultaneously extends the following major dimensions of meta-design: (1) It exploits the contributions of social media and web 2.0 as innovative information technologies; (2) It facilitates the shift from consumer cultures to cultures of participation; (3) It fosters social creativity by harnessing contributions that occur in cultures of participation; (4) It empowers end-users to be active designers involved in creating situated solutions. In a world where change is the norm, meta-design is a necessity rather than a luxury because it is impossible to design software systems at design time for problems that occur only at use time. The co-evolution of systems and users? social practices pursued in this thesis requires a software environment that can evolve and be tailored continuously.
End-user development explores tools and methods to support end users who tailor software artifacts. However, it addresses this objective primarily from a technical perspective and focuses mainly on tailorability. This thesis, centered on meta-design, extends end-user development by creating social conditions and design processes for broad participation in design activities both at design time and at use time. It builds on previous research into meta- design that has provided a strategic overview of design opportunities and principles. And it addresses some shortcomings of meta-design, such as the lack of guidelines for building concrete meta-design environments that can be assessed by empirical evaluation.
Given the goal of this research, to explore meta-design approaches for cultivating and supporting collaborative design, the overarching research question guiding this work is:
How do we provide a socio-technical environment to bring multidisciplinary design communities together to foster creativity, collaboration, and design evolution?
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To answer this question, my research was carried out through four different phases: (1) synthesizing concepts, models, and theories; (2) framing conceptual models; (3) developing several systems in specific application areas; and (4) conducting empirical evaluation studies.
The main contributions of this research are:
? The Hive-Mind Space model, a meta-design framework derived from the ?software shaping workshop? methodology and that integrates the ?seeding, evolutionary growth, reseeding? model. The bottom-up approach inherent in this framework breaks down static social structures so as to support richer ecologies of participation. It provides the means for structuring communication and appropriation. The model?s open mediation mechanism tackles unanticipated communication gaps among different design communities.
? MikiWiki, a structured programmable wiki I developed to demonstrate how the hive-mind space model can be implemented as a practical platform that benefits users and how its features and values can be specified so as to be empirically observable and assessable;
? Empirical insights, such as those based on applying MikiWiki to different collaborative design studies, provide evidence that different phases of meta-design represent different modes rather than discrete levels.