This workshop investigates how Cultures of Participation, End-User Development, and Meta-Design are evolving in the era of AI-based systems.While Large Language Models and co-piloting approaches are transforming development into a more accessible and creative activity, they also introduce challenges related to agency, transparency, ethics, and sustainability.Aligned with the AVI 2026 theme "Interactive Creativity: Agencies, Interfaces, and Ethics", CoPDA2026 wants to explore how AI-augmented participation can support creativity, learning, and collaboration while addressing risks such as overreliance and opacity.The goal is to foster discussion and define research directions for responsible and empowering AI-enabled socio-technical systems.

This paper advocates for a Human-Centered Interaction Design perspective in the design of gamified Digital Twins to support sustainability. We propose a conceptual framework for socio-technical system design grounded in three goals: supporting a sense of purpose, enhancing awareness, and fostering engagement. We discuss the applicability of the framework through two case studies (smart home management and elderly assistance) chosen to illustrate its relevance across distinct application domains.

Abstract This systematic review investigates how digital twin technologies are combined with gamification to support sustainability across different domains. Using the PRISMA 2020 framework, we retrieved 122 records from three databases. After screening, 23 papers satisfying the inclusion criteria were analyzed in depth. Each one was examined along nine dimensions: application domain, motivation, case study, use of real-time data synchronization, digital twin type, gamification elements, visualization and interaction modalities, user involvement, and alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The results reveal a research landscape that is still emerging, characterized by heterogeneous methodologies, limited maturity of digital twin implementations, and a predominant use of basic gamification strategies. The findings of this review informed a set of design implications and the formulation of a conceptual framework to guide the design of gamified digital twins that foster sustainability in its various forms.

This paper explores the development of a Digital Twin (DT) of a smart home, which allows end users to monitor the state of appliances and their energy consumption. The DT will also make it possible to simulate different ‘what-if’ scenarios related to the automations defined by the end users through End-User Development. Simulations will allow users to evaluate in advance the effects of appliance activation in terms of energy consumption and, after their analysis, to approve the deployment of automations in the domestic environment or modify them as suggested by the DT.

Meta-design promotes ‘design for designers’ or, in other words, the creation of socio-technical environments that can evolve in the hands of the users. The long-term goal of meta-design is improving the quality of life in each person’s everyday activities, that is, living, working, and learning with the aid of technology. Today, advances in Artificial Intelligence provide new opportunities and frontiers for meta-design to empower users much more than in the past, giving them new perspectives, strategies, and tools to be exploited in the ‘design for design’ process.

Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and meta-design challenge the understanding of the concept of “end user”. The 8th edition of a workshop in the series “Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age” (CoPDA 2024) aims to critically differentiate, dissect, and deepen the roles, experiences, and demands of end users considering contributions from different perspectives.

This paper presents a study about the mapping of the EUDability of End-User Development (EUD) tools with the Computational Thinking (CT) skills of users. This mapping provides an approach to evaluate the suitability of a EUD environment in supporting people performing their daily work while managing and exploiting EUD tools. EUDability is a construct encompassing different dimensions that need to be assessed through a careful scrutiny by human-computer interaction experts, while CT skills should mirror those dimensions from the point of view of assessing the level of ability of users in managing problems with a computational thinking attitude. Moving from the healthcare domain, we present two cases: a tool for geriatric professionals supporting them in the preparation of cognitive exercises for elderly patients; and a tool for pharmacists, which empowers them to create robot programs related to the preparation of personalized medications. These cases have been exploited to show how to unify the EUDability assessment with the CT skills assessment. In particular, the application of the EUDability evaluation method for each tool, as well as the administration of the Computational Thinking Scale to domain experts are shown. The results of the two assessments are reported and discussed, together with the limitations of the present study. The results show the goodness of fit of the proposed EUD tools in the healthcare domain.

Automations can help support the achievement of various types of goals in a smart home. We present an architecture enabling the possibility of supporting user goals consistent with the principles of a circular economy (such as energy saving and waste recycling). It includes meta-design tools for creating automations that better fit user needs and controlling their execution through innovative modalities based on conversational agents and augmented reality, and a home Digital Twin useful for supporting relevant simulations and analytics to understand the potential impact of specific automations on aspects relevant for circular economy.

Nowadays, end users can create routines for Amazon Echo and Google Nest devices using a companion app (Amazon Alexa and Google Home, respectively) running on smartphones. Our work explores the possibility of transferring this End-User Development activity directly to the smart speakers, with and without a touchscreen. To this aim, we designed and developed two Amazon Skills (one for Amazon Echo Show and the other for Amazon Echo Dot) and two Google Actions (one for Google Nest Hub and the other for Google Home Speaker). Then, we carried out two controlled experiments, involving 40 participants, to compare routine creation through multi-modal interaction (based on vision, speech, and touch) with routine creation through speech-only interaction. Driven by our research questions, we found that for routine creation the multi-modal interaction is preferred to the speech-only one and the perceived quality of interaction seems to depend on the brand of the smart speaker.

With the spreading of Industry 4.0, cyber-physical systems, and tools for augmented and virtual reality, Digital Twin (DT) is gaining momentum in several areas of Computer Science and Engineering. This paper presents a systematic literature review that investigates the way DTs are described in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scientific literature. The study includes 23 papers selected through a systematic search on the 21 most ranked journals and conferences in the HCI area. As a result of this work, it appears clear that the way humans interact with DTs is a topic still far from being widely studied. A set of hints for future research about the relationship between HCI and DT constitute the main outcome of this paper.

The sixth edition of the CoPDA workshop is dedicated to discussing the current challenges and opportunities of Cultures of Participation with respect to Artificial Intelligence (AI) by contrasting it with the objectives pursued by Human-Centered Design (HCD). The workshop aims to establish a forum to explore our basic assumption (and to provide at least partial evidence) that the most successful AI systems out there today are dependent on teams of humans, just as humans depend on these systems to gain access to information, provide insights and perform tasks beyond their own capabilities.

Smart speakers can execute user-defined routines, namely, sequences of actions triggered by specific events or conditions. This paper presents a new approach to the creation of routines, which leverages the multi-modal features (vision, speech, and touch) offered by Amazon Alexa running on Echo Show devices. It then illustrates how end users found easier to create routines with the proposed approach than with the usual interaction with the Alexa app.

End-user development (EUD) is a research area that rapidly developed after the European Network of Excellence (EUD-Net) established in 2003. It aims at proposing approaches to empower end users to ...

The society we live in today is frequently referred to as knowledge society or knowledge economy, and the futurist Toffler (1981) refers to it as ‘The Third Wave Society’ by arguing it is as distin...

The digital age of the future is ‘not out there to be discovered’, but it needs to be ‘designed’. The design challenge has to address questions about how we want to live, work, and learn (as individuals and as communities) and what we value and appreciate, e.g.: reflecting on quality of life and creating inclusive societies. An overriding design trade-off for the digital age is whether new developments will increase the digital divide or will create more inclusive societies. Sustaining inclusive societies means allowing people of all ages and all abilities to exploit information technologies for personally meaningful activities. Meta-design fosters the design of socio-technical environments that end-user developers can modify and evolve at use time to improve their quality of life and favour their inclusion in the society. This paper describes three case studies in the domain of assistive technologies in which end users themselves cannot act as end-user developers, but someone else (e.g.: a caregiver or a clinician) must accept this role requiring multi-tiered architectures. The design trade-offs and requirements for meta-design identified in the context of the case studies and other researchers’ projects are described to inform the development of future socio-technical environments focused on social inclusion.

Algorithms are more and more pervading our everyday life: from automatic checkouts in supermarkets and e-banking to booking a flight online. Understanding an algorithmic solution to a problem is a very relevant activity to improve end-users’ involvement. To this end, adopting a meta-design approach may help to support end-users to appropriate the design skills necessary for contributing to system design, in new and engaging modalities. By acquiring Computational Thinking (CT) skills (e.g., algorithmic thinking, abstraction), end-users will be able to understand and trust algorithms, while at the same time participate in the design and development of systems evolving in accordance with their needs. In this work, we focus on two different ways of improving CT skills: playfulness and collaboration. We introduce a game-based system, TAPASPlay, to foster CT skills and we report the results of an exploratory study with 18 users; our hypothesis is that learning CT through gameplay is effective and we tested it by involving participants in game sessions providing playful experience and collaborative learning.

This new edition of CoPDA workshop, the 5th since 2013, is dedicated to the discussion of design trade-offs that have to be addressed for embracing diversity and implementing an inclusive society. With this workshop, we invite researchers and practitioners to discuss and exchange experiences able to inform design processes in a Cultures of Participation perspective, focusing on theoretical frameworks, practical experiences, case studies, and research projects, both in Academy and Industry.

In our prior work, we presented a novel approach to the evaluation of quality in use of corporate web sites based on an original quality model (QM-U) and a related methodology (EQ-EVAL). This article focuses on two research questions. The first one aims at investigating whether expected quality obtained through the application of EQ-EVAL methodology by employing a small panel of evaluators is a good approximation of actual quality obtained through experimentation with real users. To answer this research question, a comparative study has been carried out involving 5 evaluators and 50 real users. The second research question aims at demonstrating that the adoption of the EQ-EVAL methodology can provide useful information for web site improvement. Three original indicators, namely coherence, coverage and ranking have been defined to answer this question, and an additional study comparing the assessments of two panels of 5 and 10 evaluators, respectively, has been carried out. The results obtained in both studies are largely positive and provide a rational support for the adoption of the EQ-EVAL methodology.

In this paper we describe how to use a Game-Based Learning (GBL) approach to help end-user programmers to develop Computational Thinking (CT) skills. CT represents a framework consisting of a set of skills such as: abstraction, decomposition and more in general problem solving expressed in a computational form (algorithmic thinking) that can be easily formalised into a computer program. Those skills are beneficial for end-user programmers in order to model a task for being tackled with computational tools, e.g. spreadsheets, domain specific and visual languages. TAPASPlay is an engaging GBL platform designed to help end-user to learn algorithmic thinking.

This paper presents TAB Sharing, a mobile application aimed at empowering citizens in creating and sharing proposals with other citizens and public administration (PA). Proposals are conceived as solutions to problems occurring in a community or initiatives that should be pursued. Gamification elements have been included in TAB Sharing to sustain citizens' participation and encourage them in providing as much details as possible in their proposals to better support PA decision-making.

Big data analytics in healthcare would be almost useless, without suitable tools allowing users "see" them, and gain insight for their situated decisions. The VVH (Valuable Visualization in Healthcare) workshop focuses on the role of interactive data visualization tools by which people can make sense of healthcare data; these data include sensor data, the messages exchanged in social media, the emails between patients and their doctors, the content of patient records as well as the discussions among different specialists that led to such record content. All these data are used by different types of users, like doctors, nurses, policy makers and common citizens. The VVH workshop aims at contributing on: the assessment of the usability of advanced interactive tools of health-related data visualization; the assessment of the quality of the information and value for insight that these tools make available to their users; the collection of reports of either success stories or failures in the appropriation and use of complex and multidimensional healthcare datasets; the collection of methodological and design-oriented contributions that could share methods, techniques, and heuristics for the design of interactive tools and applications supporting data work, data telling and data interpretation in healthcare.

This paper describes [email protected], a collaborative system prototype for smart home management and configuration. In particular, the system is based on event-condition-action rules. Rule construction and manipulation occur through gamification mechanisms supporting social interaction, collaboration and competition, in order to engage all family members in shaping their smart home.

This paper describes a framework that supports the physical prototyping of innovative interactive artifacts. Specifically, the framework allows designing, implementing, and testing "social products," that is, physical artifacts able to interact with social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others. Since the target users of the framework are not expert in software programming, an End-User Development (EUD) approach has been adopted, which aims at facilitating the ideation process and providing simple mechanisms for automatic code generation and testing. User tests have proved the usefulness and validity of the framework, and provided indications for how to expand it.

This paper proposes an approach to improve the work practice currently adopted by a local municipality to create e-government services. The approach is based on meta-design and end-user development. These paradigms allow empowering domain experts, namely civil servants with competencies in government procedures, to design and develop e-government applications to be used by citizens and administrative employees. This requires, on the one hand, to pay attention on the visual interaction aspects of the tools designed to support domain experts, and, on the other hand, to create suitable mechanisms for the automatic generation of user interfaces, application logic and databases. These goals are achieved by conceiving meta-design as a participatory design activity aimed at creating meta-models of e-government applications and suitable tools exploiting such meta-models for code generation.

Dynamic web sites and rich internet applications have recently got widespread. An important challenge is guaranteeing their accessibility to all potential users regardless of physical and cognitive disabilities as well as hardware and software limitations. To this aim, WCAG 2.0 guidelines have been released as the newest W3C recommendation for accessible web content, and WAI-ARIA are reference specifications for accessible rich internet applications. However, both design resources contain a huge amount of information, and, like all standards and guidelines, do not provide designers with a clear design method. This paper proposes a design pattern language for accessibility to help web designers create accessible rich internet applications compliant with the most recent standards. The language has been implemented as an accessible rich internet application itself, allowing designers with disabilities to participate in web design. The results of a preliminary evaluation are finally discussed.

This paper describes the ongoing collaboration between the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Brescia and a local government agency. The goal is to create the socio-technical conditions for transferring the ability to develop web-based government-to-citizen services from software professionals to administrative personnel. To this end, proper end-user development techniques should be defined by capturing and exploiting employees' best practices and expertise. With reference to a typical government service, the paper reports summary results from a study of administrative personnel work practices and explores employees' motivations to become end-user software developers. It then outlines the design pattern language we have been defining for the considered domain to represent, from the employees' point of view, the problems encountered while creating government services together with their possible solutions. This is the starting point for identifying a further language that addresses the problem of end-user development of e-government services from an interaction-design point of view. These pattern languages can be regarded as metadesign tools for end-user development whose final aim is to support, and even improve, existing best practices in service creation, thus increasing employees' motivation and engagement in end-user development activities.

Due to the increasing sophistication in web technologies, maps can easily be created, modified, and shared. This possibility has popularized the power of maps by enabling people to add and share cartographic content, giving rise to the geospatial web. People are increasingly using web maps to connect with each other and with the urban and natural environment in ways no one had predicted. As a result, web maps are growing into a venue in which knowledge and meanings can be traced and visualized. However, the cartographic semantics of current web mapping services are not designed to elicit and visualize what we call affective meaning. Contributing a new perspective for the geospatial web, the authors argue for affective geographies capable of allowing richer and multiple readings of the same territory. This paper illustrates the cartographic semantics developed by the authors and discusses it through a case study in natural heritage interpretation.

This paper presents a novel participatory approach to the design of customized and tailorable visual interactive systems; it includes end users as domain experts in the design team. A design method is described which leads to two different visual specifications, one suitable for end users and the other suitable for software engineers. It is also shown how this second specification is directly mapped to the implementation architecture, based on XML technology. The discussion is supported by the description of an example in the mechanical engineering domain.

This paper is about the development of systems whose end users are professional people working in a specific domain (e.g., medicine, geology, mechanical engineering); they are expert in that domain, but not necessarily expert in nor even conversant with computer science. In several work organizations, end users need to tailor their software systems to better adapt them to their requirements and even to create or modify software artifacts. These are end-user development activities and are the focus of this paper. A model of the interaction between users and systems, which also takes into account their reciprocal coevolution during system usage, is discussed. This model is used to define a methodology aimed at designing software environments that allow end users to become designers of their own tools. The methodology is illustrated by discussing two experimental cases.

Interactive systems supporting people activities, even those designed for a specific application domain, should be very flexible, i. e., they should be easily adaptable to specific needs of the user communities. They should even allow users to personalize the system to better fit with their evolving needs. This paper presents an original model of the interaction and co-evolution processes occurring between humans and interactive systems and discusses an approach to design systems that supports such processes. The approach is based on the "artisan's workshop" metaphor and foresees the participatory design of an interactive system as a network of workshops customized to different user communities and connected one another by communication paths. Such paths allow end users and members of the design team to trigger and actuate the co-evolution. The feasibility of the methodology is illustrated through a case study in the medical domain.

Meta-design has been recently proposed as a technique for creating the socio-technical conditions empowering users to perform end-user development (EUD) activities. Current techniques and methodologies for designing interactive systems do not stress meta-design. In this paper, we show how the Software Shaping Workshop (SSW) methodology actually follows a meta-design approach in that the teams of designers, including end-user representatives, are supported in their reasoning on software design and development by software environments tailored to their needs, notations and experience.

Electronic document and electronic annotation evolve and complement the traditional document and annotation in recording, developing and making available community knowledge. This paper discusses electronic annotation and its importance as a tool for two way exchange of ideas among humans pursuing a common goal. The discussion is performed by presenting an example in the Earth science field.

This paper discusses a model-based approach to the design of complex interaction environments like virtual worlds, mixed and augmented reality. The environment a user interacts with is seen as a virtual environment populated by virtual entities, created and maintained active by a program interpreted by the computer, which can be described by specifying the behavior of the population. The specification of the behavior occurs along three dimensions; 1) programming languages to specify system computations; 2) user activity languages to specify user activities; 3) perceptual languages to deal with the physical characteristics of the messages from the machine to the user. These dimensions define an interaction modeling space which constitutes the frame in which the virtual environment is specified

Visual Languages for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are a good basis for the development of software environments to be used by professional people such as engineers, geologists, medical doctors, etc. The research we have conducted, along with the experience we have gained working with these people, has compelled us to develop software environments that not only are easier to learn and use, but also allow their users to tailor them to their own needs, and to even create or modify software artifacts. The design methodology that we have developed is refined in this paper, giving insights emerging from our recent experiences, and emphasizing how it supports human centric-computing and end-user development.

This paper presents an approach to support the designer of Visual Interactive Systems (VISs) in adapting a VIS to the evolution of its users. This process is called co-evolution of users and systems. The approach is based on the identification of the patterns of interaction between the user and an interactive system and on their use for the evolution of the system to facilitate novel usages introduced by the user. The approach is focused on WIMP systems and is based on the recently introduced PCL (Pictorial Computing Laboratory) model of interaction, within which we provide a novel definition of interaction pattern. The proposal assumes that the VIS is observed by an external system called SIC (Supporting Interaction Co-evolution), which is in charge of recording the interactions between the user and the VIS and of analyzing the relevant interaction patterns. In particular, SIC exploits a UML-based statechart specification of the VIS in order to associate observed user activities with the states of the interactive process. This information provides a useful basis for a variety of pattern recognition techniques. Two techniques called usual state and recurrent sequence recognition are illustrated and the results of a first experiment are discussed. © 2009 ACM.