Supporting End-User Development by Transforming Participatory Design into Meta-Design

Our contribution explores the concept of meta-design as a framework that augments participatory design (PD) for supporting end-user development (EUD). Participatory design emphasizes the active involvement of users in the initial stages of the design process, fostering collaboration and ensuring that the final product meets user needs. End-user development empowers users to create, extend, and adapt software artifacts by fostering human problem-domain interaction, promoting evolutionary design and personalization. Meta-design integrates these two approaches by providing tools, environments, and processes that enable continuous user involvement and system evolution. Our contribution explores how meta-design facilitates the transition from collaborative initial design to sustained user-driven development, ensuring that systems remain flexible, relevant, and user-centred. We illustrate how meta-design not only enhances user empowerment and system adaptability but that the dynamic, ongoing collaboration between users and designers will create socio-technical environments focused on the “unfinished” and consider that design problems have no stopping rule, thus remaining open and fluid to accommodate ongoing change.