Rethinking software design in participation cultures
The research activities in software engineering at the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design (L3D) in the past have been grounded in the basic assumption that important aspects of software engineering are best understood as human-centered design activities. Some of the major objectives were to support designers with domain-oriented design environments, allowing them to interact at the problem domain level and to frame activities and artifacts based on an evolutionary approach. A fundamental shift occurring over the last few years is the formation of participation cultures enhanced and supported by a change from an industrialized information economy (specialized in producing finished goods to be consumed passively) to a cyber-enabled networked information economy (in which all people are provided with the means to participate actively in personally meaningful problems). Some of the implications of this fundamental shift for software engineering, including meta-design, lessons learned from open source software, and distribution and diversity in communities, are explored, and their implications for the "automate/informate" perspectives are briefly discussed.
software design participation cultures domain-oriented design environments networked information economy distribution and diversity human-problem domain interaction meta-design