Fostering Participation and Co-Evolution in Sentient Multimedia Systems

User diversity and co-evolution of users and systems are two important phenomena usually observed in the design and use of IT artifacts. In recent years, End-User Development (EUD) has been proposed to take into account these phenomena, by providing mechanisms that support people, who are not software professionals, to modify, adapt, and even create IT artifacts according to their specific evolving needs. This is particularly true in the case of sentient multimedia systems, in which the system is called on to interact with multiple sensors and multiple human actors. However, to motivate and sustain these people, a culture of participation is necessary, as well as proper metadesign activities that may promote and maintain it. To this aim, this paper first proposes a model for describing interaction and co-evolution in sentient multimedia systems enhanced by EUD features. Then it presents four main roles involved in interaction and co-evolution, including that of maieuta-designer, as the “social counterpart” of the meta-designer. Finally, it describes how the maieuta-designer is in charge of carrying out all those activities that are necessary to cultivate a culture of participation, by means of proper ways that are briefly introduced in the paper. Keywords-End-User Development; cultures of participation; coevolution; meta-designer; maieuta-designer I.! INTRODUCTION Sentient multimedia systems are distributed systems that actively interact with the environment through the exchange of multimedia information with many kinds of information sources, such as sensors, robots, actuators, websites and others. End users also belong to such sources of information, since they are called on to communicate and express their feelings, evolving needs and requests to this web of computational nodes. Accordingly, the overall system has to take into account this information flow coming from humans. If we take this stance, a sentient multimedia system can also be seen as a socio-technical system, which encompasses people (rather than just users) that are bound together by social ties and personal relations of acquaintance and that are also linked with each other and with personal devices and other machines. The latter are able to perceive the environment in which people interact, also by considering the capability of people to feel a situation besides perceiving it (e.g., through the issue of a preference, "likes", and emoticons in tweets), and interpret situations to give people multimedia and multichannel means to act accordingly. In many IT domains, IT artifacts are usually developed as commodities rather than as ad-hoc projects, that is more for uniform populations of consumers rather than for members of different communities that exhibit local needs and perform situated practices to achieve their goals [1]. Moreover, each end-user community is often characterized by user diversity, due to users’ different physical and/or cognitive abilities, past experiences, roles, responsibilities and work contexts. To this end, in today's competitive global market, the adoption of product configuration software has recently helped to increasingly speed up the understanding of the customers' needs for a successful design and implementation of customized products [2-5]. In fact, product configuration is the activity of customizing a product, in order to better meet the needs of a particular end user more quickly. However, fulfilling the needs of end users is a “moving target” [6], since they evolve (e.g., regarding their proficiency of use, skills, expectations, needs, wishes and domain knowledge) by using software systems, and they can also change their practices (to accommodate the new artifact [7]). Acknowledging this twofold evolution (i.e., of users and their tasks) entails the requirement that IT artifacts should be designed to be very flexible, in order to be easily adapted to the specific needs of the user communities and, hopefully, to be personalized by the individual users to better fit their own evolving needs. This overall phenomenon has been called co-evolution of users and systems, to denote the variety of situations where users and their systems must co-evolve in a continuously self-adapting mutual fit [8]. End-User Development (EUD) has been proposed as one possible solution to cope with the challenges posed by user diversity and co-evolution, since it encompasses techniques that allow end users to modify and extend their own IT artifacts without necessarily delegating these modifications to software professional developers. Taking co-evolution seriously sheds light on the fact that continuously relying on professional actors for these interventions would not be feasible in the long run. Indeed, one kind of unintended consequence related to IT artifact deployment, which is reported most frequently in the specialist literature, regards the never-ending request for modifications, corrections and evolution of artifacts by the users [9]. In other words, in a EUD perspective, software systems are viewed as “continuously evolving sociotechnical