Complex design problems often cannot be solved by individuals or by homogenous groups. Communities of interest (CoIs) (defined by their collective concern with the resolution of a problem) bring together stakeholders from different communities of practice (CoP). Reaching a common understanding between these stakeholders is a major challenge due to the "symmetry of ignorance" caused by their respective cultures and their use of different knowledge systems. Our research has focused on the development of conceptual frameworks and innovative socio-technical environments to exploit the "symmetry of ignorance" as a source for social creativity among CoIs. Gerhard Fischer 2 IRIS'24, Norway 1

Design is a rich domain in which to investigate barriers and biases in computer-supported communication because it involves many different modes of communication in social-technical contexts. This chapter briefly describes different design approaches. It analyzes the biases and barriers of two different types of design communities: communities of practice and communities of interest. To address the communication challenges between diverse design communities, boundary objects are needed to establish common ground and shared understanding in the context of complex design tasks. We explore the unique possibilities that computational media have to support our conceptual framework. Our work is based on the fundamental belief that there is no media-independent communication and interaction—that tools, materials, and social arrangements are always involved in some way in these activities. The possibilities and the practice of design are functions

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Abstract. Current peer-to-peer architectures are hardly resistant against unanticipated exceptions such as the failure of single peers. This can be justified by the absence of sophisticated models for exception detection and resolution in peer-to-peer architectures. On the other hand, existing generic models for such self-adaptable architectures are rather theoretical and less suitable for the usage by end-users. In this work, strategies for a new self-adaptability model in peerto-peer architecture are presented incorporating the component technology as the conceptual foundation. The claim of this approach is that through the intuitive nature of the component technology the process of self-adaptability becomes more applicable and more comprehendible even for less experienced end-users. 1

Evolution in scientific software is often according to a specific pattern of software changes: professional scientists, who are not professional software developers, need rapid, dynamic, and domain-specific changes of the software they work with. To address unanticipated software evolution in this field, our objective is to enable these end-users (here: biologists) to change software from the user interface. An approach is presented that integrates technological and methodological solutions. We explain why these solutions are complementary, and how they can be integrated and co-evolved from software design to actual use. 1

CSCL applications are complex distributed systems that pose special requirements towards achieving success in educational settings. Flexible and efficient design of collaborative activities by educators is a key precondition in order to provide CSCL tailorable systems, capable of adapting to the needs of each particular learning environment. Furthermore, some parts of those CSCL systems should be reused as often as possible in order to reduce development costs. In addition, it may be necessary to employ special hardware devices, computational resources that reside in other organizations, or even exceed the possibilities of one specific organization. Therefore, the proposal of this paper is twofold: collecting collaborative learning designs (scripting) provided by educators, based on well-known best practices (collaborative learning flow patterns) in a standard way (IMS-LD) in order to guide the tailoring of CSCL systems by selecting and integrating reusable CSCL software units; and, implementing those units in the form of grid services offered by third party providers. More specifically, this paper outlines a grid-based CSCL system having these features and illustrates its potential scope and applicability by means of a sample collaborative learning scenario.

Today, participation seems to be an established, necessary as well as valuable approach during system development. However, because of the shift from individually developed to package software participatory design needs to be addressed in new ways.

This paper presents an approach for how end-users can tailor (and evolve) generic computer applications into domain-oriented design environments. It is proposed as a remedy for inflexible computer applications, and as an alternative to building domain-oriented design environments from low-level building blocks. A typical generic application is a word processor, a drawing program, or an e-mail system developed for a generic task such as writing, creating diagrams, or sending electronic messages; whereas a domain-oriented design environment is an application developed for a specialized task, such as collaborative writing, home planning, or meeting scheduling. End-user tailoring addresses general problems in software reuse and requirements capture. It supports application evolution by a set of tools that are integrated into a generic application. The tools give an end-user access to the parts of the application that have to be addressed during tailoring. A method for building and integrating the tools is described. How to use the tools to evolve a basic drawing program into a kitchen design environment is given as an example. The paper ends with a general discussion of the approach, and gives suggestions for further work in the area. 1.

There are several categories of end-users of computer systems, depending on their culture, skills, and types of tasks they perform. This paper recognizes the problem of ‘user diversity ’ even among people of the same technical or scientific tradition, and focuses on the study of a specific category of end-users, that we call domain-expert users: they are professionals in some domain different from computer science, who need to use computers in their daily work. We analyse the activities they usually perform or are willing to perform with computers and we identify their real needs of carrying out activities that result in the creation or modification of software artefacts. 1

The choice of the most suitable middleware technology for a specific problem or domain is sometimes erroneously based on current trends instead of on a thorough comparison of the features offered by the different options. This could be the case of grid services technology, which is claimed to be a technological advance, but whose characteristics are not clearly contrasted with other middleware technologies. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether grid services technology truly present some required properties for CSCL (Computers Supported Collaborative Learning) application development in comparison with other service-oriented middleware technologies, as well as with other types of middleware paradigms (object-oriented or component-oriented). To this end, we present relevant requirements of CSCL applications and theoretical discussion about how well they are satisfied by the aforementioned paradigms and technologies. Finally, we introduce a case study in order to illustrate our conclusions.