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.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming humans’ activities through continuous collaboration in domains where AI-supported decisions affect humans and societies. In this context, the focus should shift toward the development of Symbiotic AI (SAI) systems that support humans rather than replace them. This contribution presents a set of Success Criteria (SC) that can be used to evaluate such SAI systems by determining whether the requirements of symbiosis are met. The paper also includes a preliminary validation of the criteria through a pilot user study.

The rapid spread of Large Language Models (LLMs) is influencing many contexts, shaping the way in which humans conduct activities. LLMs can represent a promising instrument in the medical field to support physicians in creating therapy. This contribution aims at presenting the employment of LLMs for creating exercises addressed to speech therapies investigating whether these can be an effective tool to support physician in this activity. This contribution presents the experimental setup of tests conducted with LLMs along with an overview of the obtained results showing the potential and limitations of this technology.

Integrated Development Environments increasingly implement AI-powered code completion tools (CCTs), which promise to enhance developer efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. However, interaction challenges with CCTs persist, mainly due to mismatches between developers’ mental models and the unpredictable behavior of AI-generated suggestions, which is an aspect underexplored in the literature. We conducted an elicitation study with 56 developers using co-design workshops to elicit their mental models when interacting with CCTs. Different important findings that might drive the interaction design with CCTs emerged. For example, developers expressed diverse preferences on when and how code suggestions should be triggered (proactive, manual, hybrid), where and how they are displayed (inline, sidebar, popup, chatbot), as well as the level of detail. It also emerged that developers need to be supported by customization of activation timing, display modality, suggestion granularity, and explanation content, to better fit the CCT to their preferences. To demonstrate the feasibility of these and the other guidelines that emerged during the study, we developed ATHENA, a proof-of-concept CCT that dynamically adapts to developers’ coding preferences and environments, ensuring seamless integration into diverse workflows. • Users want flexible triggers: balance control with smart automation • Inline works for short code; sidebar/chatbot for longer suggestions • Start minimal, let users expand from single lines to full files • Keep explanations short, contextual, opened by click or shortcut • Let users tune timing, style, detail level, and coding format

This special issue presents four papers featuring extended versions of full papers originally published at the Conference INTERACT 2023, which was held August 28th to September 1st, 2023, at the University of York, York, UK. We will first present the INTERACT Conference and then the selection process of papers that ultimately led to publication of this special issue in Interacting with Computers. The INTERACT Conference is held every 2 years. It started in 1984, making it one of the longest running conferences on human–computer interaction. INTERACT 2023 was the 19th International Conference of Technical Committee 13 (Human–Computer Interaction) of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). IFIP was created in 1960 under the auspices of UNESCO. The IFIP Technical Committee 13 (TC13)1 aims to develop the science and technology of human–computer interaction (HCI). The INTERACT Conference series is an important showcase for researchers and practitioners in the field of HCI. Coming under the open, inclusive umbrella of the IFIP, INTERACT is truly international in its spirit and attracts researchers from many countries and cultures. The venues of the INTERACT conferences over the years bear a testimony to this inclusiveness.

Abstract The rapid growth in interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a significant driver of research and business activities in recent years. This raises new critical issues, particularly concerning interaction with AI systems. This article first presents a survey that identifies the primary issues addressed in Human-Centered AI (HCAI), focusing on the interaction with AI systems. The survey outcomes permit to clarify disciplines, concepts, and terms around HCAI, solutions to design and evaluate HCAI systems, and the emerging challenges; these are all discussed with the aim of supporting researchers in identifying more pertinent approaches to create HCAI systems. Another main finding emerging from the survey is the need to create Symbiotic AI (SAI) systems. Definitions of both HCAI systems and SAI systems are provided. To illustrate and frame SAI more clearly, we focus on medical applications, discussing two case studies of SAI systems.

Eating disorders are disturbances in people’s eating behaviours that can influence their social and private lives, with consequences related to mental and physical health. Therefore, they must be timely and appropriately treated by professionals and, in this context, the employment of technology can improve the efficiency of treatments allowing remote assistance, continuous monitor, and less stress than the traditional medical approach.

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.

Several studies have shown that involving users in design processes is a key factor in understanding user needs and essential for designing computer systems capable of providing valuable user experiences. However, many practitioners do not emphasize user needs sufficiently and neglect user involvement in software design and development. The UCD Sprint is a recently proposed, step-by-step, cost-effective process that focuses on involving users in design activities. This article reports a mixed-method study in which, for the first time, practitioners working in companies used the UCD Sprint; the study’s main objective was to investigate the impact of the UCD Sprint on practitioners’ design practices. The results show that, among the various activities associated with this process, those that involved users were particularly appreciated by practitioners. Thus, the UCD Sprint can enhance the innovativeness of company design practices; it enables practitioners to obtain sufficient information to create systems that fit users’ needs.

Privacy by Design and Security by Design are two fundamental aspects in the current technological and regulatory context. Therefore, software development must integrate these aspects and consider software security on one hand, and user-centricity from the design phase on the other. It is necessary to support the team in all stages of the software lifecycle in integrating privacy and security requirements. Taking these aspects into account, the paper presents VIS-PRISE prototype, a visual tool for supporting the design team in the secure agile development.

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.

Computational Thinking (CT) education is spreading all over the world involving all levels of schools. Software and hardware solutions have been designed and developed to introduce CT at school. In this paper, the first trial of coding activities has been realized using Pepper Social Robot. The idea is to allow pupils to program Pepper; the mission is to guide the robot through a path on a grid sketched on the floor to reach a predefined target. A user test was conducted to evaluate the experience of pupils, in terms of effectiveness, engagement, and cognitive workload in a learning coding activity that involves the social robot Pepper. Pupils appreciated the use of the robot which can interact with them, they were very engaged in the activity and improve their knowledge about coding.

Nowadays, the dimension and complexity of software development projects increase the possibility of cyber-attacks, information exfiltration and data breaches. In this context, developers play a primary role in addressing privacy requirements and, consequently security, in software applications. Currently, only general guidelines exist that are difficult to put in operation due to the lack of the required security skills and knowledge, and to the use of legacy software development processes that do not deal with privacy and security aspects. This paper presents a knowledge base, the Privacy Knowledge Base (PKB), and the VIS-PRISE prototype (Visually Inspection to Support Privacy and Security) a visual tool that support developers' decisions to integrate privacy and security requirements in all software development phases. An initial experimental study with junior developers is also presented.

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.

Abstract Automation in computing systems has always been considered a valuable solution to unburden the user. Internet of Things (IoT) technology best suits automation in different domains, such as home automation, retail, industry, and transportation, to name but a few. While these domains are strongly characterized by implicit user interaction, more recently, automation has been adopted also for the provision of interactive and immersive experiences that actively involve the users. IoT technology thus becomes the key for Smart Interactive Experiences (SIEs), i.e., immersive automated experiences created by orchestrating different devices to enable smart environments to fluidly react to the final users’ behavior. There are domains, e.g., cultural heritage, where these systems and the SIEs can support and provide several benefits. However, experts of such domains, while intrigued by the opportunity to induce SIEs, are facing tough challenges in their everyday work activities when they are required to automate and orchestrate IoT devices without the necessary coding skills. This paper presents a design approach that tries to overcome these difficulties thanks to the adoption of ontologies for defining Event-Condition-Action rules. More specifically, the approach enables domain experts to identify and specify properties of IoT devices through a user-defined semantics that, being closer to the domain experts’ background, facilitates them in automating the IoT devices behavior. We also present a study comparing three different interaction paradigms conceived to support the specification of user-defined semantics through a “transparent” use of ontologies. Based on the results of this study, we work out some lessons learned on how the proposed paradigms help domain experts express their semantics, which in turn facilitates the creation of interactive applications enabling SIEs.

Due to its geographical position, the Apulia region, is used to house migrants from all over the world who arrived over the centuries. Apulia is also a transit land for migrants that want to reach other Italian regions or European countries. One of the main issues of migration flows is related to the health services network. In this context, the Apulia Region, in collaboration with other private and public organisations, proposed the Prevenzione 4.0 (Prevention) project that aims at creating an e-health environment to empower the services of the National Health Service for migrants. Technological solutions and learning paths will be implemented to reduce the number of users who daily ask for health care services. The actions will be available for both migrants and professional figures involved in the management of migrants' reception processes. This paper presents a mobile application designed to help the migrant centres to provide medical and psychological support to their guests. The app fosters the migrants' empowerment to make them able to take care of their health without involving the National Health Service when not strictly necessary.

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.

The current Internet of Things (IoT) market proposes a wide variety of devices with complex design and different functionality. In addition, the same IoT device can be used in different domains, from home to industry, to healthcare. The management of such devices occurs in different ways, for example through visual interaction using high level programming languages (e.g. Event-Condition-Action rules) or through high level API. Generally, end users are not technical experts and are not able to configure their IoT devices, thus they need external tools (or visual interaction paradigm) to exploit and better control them. In this work, we present a model for IoT devices which allows to assess those devices and their suitability for a certain domain according to four dimensions: communication, target, data manipulation and development. The model aims at better understanding the device capabilities and, consequently, facilitating the choice of the devices that better suit the domain in which they should be used.

The current Internet of Things (IoT) trend is constantly bringing on the mass market new and more powerful devices. Such availability lead end users to find many kind of IoT devices with ease, but, their limited interoperability, lead them to confusion and frustration. As a matter of fact, many different and incompatible standards and heterogeneous applications made available by the producer, do not help end users to choose the right device to his/her needs. Other aspects such as the possibility for the end users to develop custom solutions, to improve the device functionalities, are considered secondary to the device characteristics. Moreover the data security, including the data privacy, is not considered as well. In this Work in progress paper we propose a model, to assess an IoT device according to its characteristics. The end user, by instantiating the model on a selected device, can get a score that can be exploited in the evaluation of its suitability in a particular domain.

Recent technologies are offering today many possibilities to end users, which ask for continuous support in a variety of situations. Internet of things (IoTs) and the proliferation of smart devices are offering many opportunities that raise the need to standardise protocols for their interoperability and interaction languages for their management. This study proposes EUDroid, a system composed of a mobile application and an IoT device used as a pill reminder to allow the patients to correctly take their prescribed drugs. A web server stores and manages the therapies that can be defined by the end users. The web server also manages the communication between the app and the device. In order to validate the management of the therapies, a formal language has been proposed. It describes the behaviour of different components of the IoT device, such as LEDs or buzzers, and defines when, with which delay, and for how long time a given event will last, to manage technical concepts related to smart devices for supporting them in following therapies more accurately.

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.

Cultures of participation are oriented towards providing end users with the means to actively participate in problems that are personally meaningfully to them. An overall aim of cultures of participation is to apply collective knowledge to address major problems that our societies are facing today. The CoPDA Workshop is in its second edition, after the first one that was held in 2013 during the International Symposium on End-User Development in Copenhagen (Denmark) [4]. In the 2014's edition the focus is on social computing and its contributions to learning, working and living.

There is an increasing request by organizations to allow people outside the IT department to create, shape and adapt the software artifacts they use as they do with real ones in their work practice. Moreover, organizations have recently become aware that they are part of a complex network of connections with partners, customers, and suppliers. This new consciousness has led them to the need for new ways to share their knowledge outside the organization borders. This paper capitalizes on the experience gained in the collaboration with a certification institution to propose a novel network of software environments, i.e., the Task Management System (TMS) network, and a web-service based architecture to support end users to exploit their knowledge and expertise in their daily work activities. In particular, the network allows the end users of an organization to design, execute, and check the execution of a workflow. The goal is not to automate the skills of the end users, but to assist them in their activity, permitting them to use the knowledge and expertise they possess. A prototype for the proposed architecture is currently under development, starting from the software environment dedicated to the design of workflows.

The ever increasing use of interactive software systems and the evolution of the World Wide Web into the so-called Web 2.0 determines the rise of new roles for users, who evolve from information consumers to information producers. The distinction between users and designers becomes fuzzy. Users are increasingly involved in the design and development of the tools they use, thus users and developers are not anymore two mutually exclusive groups of people. In this paper types of users that are between pure end users and software developers are analyzed. Some users take a very active role in shaping software tools to their needs, but they do it without being aware of programming, they are unwitting programmers who need appropriate development techniques and environments. A meta-design participatory approach for supporting unwitting end-user development through advanced visual systems is briefly discussed.

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.

SUIT (Systematic Usability Inspection Tool) is an Internet-based tool that supports the evaluators during the usability inspection of software applications. SUIT makes it possible to reach inspectors everywhere, guiding them in their activities. Differently from other tools that have been proposed in literature, SUIT not only supports the activities of a single evaluator, but permits to manage a team of evaluators who can perform peer reviews of their inspection works and merge their individual reports in a single document on which they agree.

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.

DAE (data analysis engine) is a framework that provides various tools for data analysis, which can assist the users in their decision making process. The tools exploit visualizations techniques; various visualizations may be generated for a set of data in order to allow users to browse among data and get the information of interest as well as discover new and possibly unexpected insights. DAE is quite general and can manage data in different domains. It supports several activities involved in the data analysis process, starting from data selection, performing various data transformations and presenting the analysis results. DAE aims at giving decision makers the possibility to directly analyze data with different tools

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.

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.