The meta-design of systems: how design, data and software enable the organizing of open, distributed, and collaborative processes

Abstract

The challenges posed by the complexity of our times requires the Design discipline to understand the many complex relationships behind the social, business, technology and territory dimensions of each project. processes and organizations (part 2). This scope falls into the Meta-Design domain, where designers build environments for the collaborative design of open processes and their resulting organizations (part 3). In this paper, we address this phenomena by elaborating the Open Meta-Design framework (part 4), that provides a way for designing open, collaborative and distributed processes (including those in the professional design domain). The paper positions the framework among current meta-design and design approaches and develops its features of modeling, analysis, management and visualization of processes. This framework is based on four dimensions: conceptual (describing the philosophy, context and limitations of the approach), data (describing the ontology of design processes), design (visualizing designing processes) and software (managing the connections between the ontology and the visualization, the data and design dimensions).We believe that such a framework could potentially facilitate the participation and the creation of open, collaborative and distributed processes, enabling therefore more relevant interactions for communities. As a conclusion, the paper provides a roadmap for developing and testing the Open Meta-Design framework, and therefore evaluating its relevance in supporting complex projects (part 5).

A Research through Design Framework from the Evaluation of a Meta-Design Platform for Open and Collaborative Design and Making Processes

“…Design processes can be then modelled, managed and researched by connecting both design research and practice through meta-design, and the framework behind this article, called OpenMetaDesign, has been developed by integrating Service Design, Activity Theory and Meta-Design. Service Design and Activity Theory provide the concepts and tools for understanding and designing activities, and Meta-Design Meta-Design provides the concepts for applying this to the reflexive and conscious design of design processes (Menichinelli, 2018a(Menichinelli, , 2018bMenichinelli and Valsecchi, 2016). OpenMetaDesign has been encoded in a digital platform that aims at enabling users to meta-design collaborative design activities as ecosystems of activities.…”