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.

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.

Senile dementia is a growing healthcare concern, highlighting the need for cognitive stimulation in individuals with mental decline. This study presents an innovative web-based dashboard to identify and address cognitive decline in elderly patients. The toolkit includes patient profiling, treatment planning, and real-time cognitive monitoring, aiming to intervene early in the onset of mental deterioration, often missed during sporadic assessments. A conversational agent (CA) tailored for older people facilitates natural cognitive exercises and allows geriatric professionals to monitor cognitive abilities remotely. This CA ensures continuous monitoring and early detection of cognitive changes. The study evaluates the efficacy of these tools in enhancing care quality, fostering independence, and promoting overall well-being among older adults.

Abstract In recent years, we have seen a significant proliferation of e-learning platforms. E-learning platforms allow teachers to create digital courses in a more effective and time-saving way, but several flaws hinder their actual success. One main problem is that teachers have difficulties finding and combining open-access learning materials that match their specific needs precisely when there are so many to choose from. This paper proposes a new strategy for creating digital courses that use learning objects (LOs) as primary elements. The idea consists of using an intelligent chatbot to assist teachers in their activities. Defined using RASA technology, the chatbot asks for information about the course the teacher has to create based on her/his profile and needs. It suggests the best LOs and how to combine them according to their prerequisites and outcomes. A chatbot-based recommendation system provides suggestions through BERT, a machine-learning model based on Transformers, to define the semantic similarity between the entered data and the LOs metadata. In addition, the chatbot also suggests how to combine the LOs into a final learning path. Finally, the paper presents some preliminary results about tests carried out by teachers in creating their digital courses.

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.

The use of learning objects (LOs) to create digital courses has been widely advocated by learning strategists and by teachers engaged in the e-learning domain. The ability to combine chunks of learning material as to meet complex educational requirements is still a challenge. This paper explores the idea that a learning assistant advises teachers about the e-learning modules to take into account for their courses. An AI-based digital assistant can provide significant opportunities, but might be perceived as a threat. The paper presents how teacher could perceive a virtual assistant as more trustworthy when it applies interactive visual strategies. To analyze teachers’ acceptance of the digital assistant, our proposal aims at extending the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model in order to incorporate three new constructors: Communicability, perceived trust and experience. To this end, 14 teachers have been involved in a user tests.

Software developers cannot easily anticipate future, idiosyncratic needs of end-users that are not always known at the time software is designed and developed, but rather emerge during the use of s...

Nowadays, new technologies are taking place for enabling conversational interactions between users and bots. Creating conversational interfaces (CI) paves the way for new design challenges. Designers need to use appropriate design specifications for creating a logically sound dialogue endowed with proper visual cues in the case of chatbots that captures the entire user experience. To do it they need the help of domain experts. Experts in mobility, environment, energy, e-health, weather, etc., are the only ones who well-know the specific domain in which the bot will act. Current tools used to design interactive flows of dialogue entail deep programming skills their users need to know. Starting from this consideration, the paper proposes a design environment that offers experts the possibility to design a flow of dialogue without getting lost in technicalities. By using visual language, the expert can specify intents, actions, entities and parameters at the base of the flow of dialogue on which the bot will be created. Then, our engine automatically translates into a bot compliant with the Google DialogFlow technology. Finally, the paper present a preliminary analysis of the system carried out to test its features and how these are reflected in its ease of use.

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...

This paper presents a study about communicability of conversational interfaces (namely chatbots) under a semiotic perspective. A chatbot is a software system that allows you to simulate real conversations between devices and users by means of a conversational interface (CI). After introducing the chatbot concept, focusing on its advantages and issues, we will present two domains of use in which chatbot interfaces can be effective: healthcare and smart home. For carrying out simple tasks such as finding information or triggering operations, users need an easy-to-use and to an easy-to-learn system to communicate with. To face this, conversational interfaces represent the latest trend in the field of digital design. For studying the communicability aspects of a CI, we carried out a user test to compare traditional and chatbot interfaces. This paper aims at evaluating the benefits at the communicability level of a chatbot in comparison to traditional GUI for incrementing the effectiveness and efficacy of communication between users and the system specifically for users with poor attitude in using technologies. In details, we evaluated the communicability of two prototypes that can be used to solve simple tasks in order to favour user inclusion, including everyone with very little exposure to technologies.

The attribute-based access control (ABAC) model has been gaining popularity in recent years because of its advantages in granularity, flexibility, and usability. Few approaches based on association rules mining have been proposed for the automatic generation of ABAC policies from access logs. Their aim is the identification of policies that do not overfit over training data, are not too general and thus does to disclose sensitive resources to everyone, and are interpretable by humans. The large ABAC privilege space along with the sparsity and unbalance distribution of the available logs make the solution of this task particularly complex and current approaches have different limitations. In this paper we compare different symbolic and nonsymbolic machine learning (ML) techniques for inferring ABAC policies and discuss their pros and cons. Based on experimental results on a toy dataset and on a real dataset, we argue that which is the best technique depends on the characteristics of the considered data. When the data are highly separable according to PCA and t-SNE decomposition, the quality of the obtained ABAC policies is higher and also policies are easily interpretable. By contrast, when this property does not hold, the quality of the obtained policies is low; in this case, non-symbolic ML techniques show better results than the symbolic ones.

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.

Thanks to pervasiveness and mobility of wearable Internet of Things tools, we are witnessing the emergence of a new research and development domain: the eWellness. Together with this, new challenges arise, and ask for effective methods and techniques to improve the way extraction, merge, analysis, visualization, and data sharing are currently managed. In this paper, we present our research on End-User Development for the eWellness domain and in particular the design and development of the SmartFit framework.

ETL (Extraction-Transform-Load) tools, traditionally developed to operate offline on historical data for feeding Datawarehouses, need to be enhanced to deal with big and fresh data and be executed at network level during data streams acquisition.In this paper, we present StreamLoader, a Web application for the specification of conceptual ETL dataflows on heterogeneous sensor data that leverages the peculiarities of network configuration, data stream management, and specification and deployment of ETL operations in a programmable network.It can be used for feeding traditional/ real-time data-warehouses or visual analytic tools.

This paper aims at introducing a new dissemination framework for cultural heritage (CH) making possible affordable solutions for small and medium museums to cooperate/collaborate in the creation of exhibitions. The framework also makes possible new data-based communication strategies able to combine content belonging to different cultural archives and accessed through an ontology-based integration and discovery mechanism, and fosters new data sharing and distribution policies that preserve intellectual property rights. The proposed dissemination model redefines the concept of digital storytelling with the aim of increasing the participation of domain experts in the dissemination of CH. The framework is designed around a graph-based architecture for creating attractive and engaging multimedia narratives that will be transformed in real experiences personalized according to the user’s profile, interests and context of use. Recommender and digital right management services are provided to authors and users for helping them in the creation, personalization and navigation of stories and for guaranteeing the adoption of suitable sharing and distribution policies.

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.

With the ambition of providing teachers with a concrete tool for worldwide exploiting didactic contents to feature their courses, we face the problem of creating a social platform with adequate functionalities to satisfy the teacher expectations. Starting with a well designed architecture we endow it with three key functionalities that become the stakeholders of the emerging social network: 1) a quality system ensuring the value of the materials the users put in the platform repository as their contribution to the social business, 2) a recommender system based on computational intelligence techniques constituting the principal tool to guide teachers along the assembling of materials into courses, and 3) a gamification system, root of the no-profit business plan of the platform, to involve teachers in the social network. As a result we delineate an ecosystem where teachers exploit contents of a repository to which contribute by themselves. They are encouraged in exploiting and contributing because the contents are of high quality; they are wisely assisted in the exploration of the repository by platform services yet under their full control; and they are variously reworded by this involvement.

In this paper we introduce a platform tailored to give teachers and trainers appropriate knowledge, skills, and innovative tools in the domain of the entrepreneurial education. To this end, a social network is created where teachers can formally or informally share experiences supporting their peers with technical training, along with theory and practical examples deriving from mutual and practical experiences in entrepreneurship. In this perspective, the platform through a systematic and intelligent use of metadata is able to offer an innovative social network specially tailored for teachers in order to valorize their competencies and to fit their expectations.

This paper presents the design and development of ArchMatrix, a visual interactive system that supports archaeologists in archiving, managing and studying the findings collected during archaeological excavations. This work allowed to deepen the study of participatory design in interdisciplinary communities and was carried out by computer scientists in close collaboration with archaeologists. To overcome the several issues that characterize the communication among different domain experts, participatory design's principles have been applied. The ArchMatrix system implements the Harris Matrix method, used both in archaeology and in architecture to describe the position (absolute and relative) of stratigraphic units. ArchMatrix relies on a graph database that enables to apply advanced information retrieval strategies. In this way, archaeologists are supported in developing new opportunities for investigation to increase their knowledge, improve their traditional working practices and to develop new ones.

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.

This paper is the result of the clashing but fruitful collaboration of experts of two different cultures - Computer Science and Archaeology _ and reports on the design and development of the T.Arc.H.N.A System, a new system of accessibility towards Cultural Heritage of the Etruscan culture. The first important result of the collaboration is the rise of an interdisciplinary team of cultural operators, which emerged from the confrontation of the different experiences acquired in each proper field of common research. As a consequence of such a confrontation process, the team was in need of new tools of expression, and communication. An ontology was defined as a new medium for communication between Computer Scientists and Archeologists. New media to record the results of the archaeological researches were introduced to disseminate knowledge to a large public in a novel, context adaptive way. The setting of these media are the base for the implementation of the working seed of the T.Arc.H.N.A System. The paper presents this open and participatory system where different actors cooperate to create and disseminate knowledge about cultural assets.

A growing number of domains are adopting semantic models as a centralized gateway to heterogeneous data sources, or directly for modeling and managing relevant information. In such contexts, it is crucial to grant access to the semantic model and its data only to the authorized users. In this paper, we present a fine-grained access control model specifically tailored to semantic models. One of the relevant features of the model is the granularity of the resources that can be protected. Access control can be enforced at the level of both the model's concepts and the concepts' instances by means of a query rewriting strategy. The proposed model has been implemented adopting the XACML standard and the SeRQL query language; services exposed by the implementation can be used to trans- paretly integrate authorization into existing systems.

In this paper we present a system we have built to disseminate cultural heritage distributed across multiple museums. Our system addresses the requirements of two categories of users: the end users that need to access information according to their interests and interaction preferences, and the domain experts and museum curators that need to develop thematic tours providing end users with a better understanding of the single artefact or collection. In our approach we make use of a semantic representation of the given heritage domain in order to build multiple visual interfaces, called "Virtual Wings" (VWs). Such interfaces allow users to navigate through data available from digital archives and thematic tours and to create their own personalized virtual visits. An interactive application integrating personalized digital guides (using PDAs) and 360 panoramic images is the example of VW presented.

This paper presents the case study of an interactive digital narrative and real-time visualization of an Italian theatre during the 19th century. This case study illustrates how to integrate the traditional concepts of cultural heritage with Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. In this way virtual reconstructions of cultural sites are lift up to an exciting new edutainment level. Novel multimedia interaction devices and digital narrative representations combined with environment historical and architectural certified, offer to the users real-time immersive visualization where to live experiences of the past. Starting to the studies of several project strengthening the great benefits connected at the use of the VR technologies in the cultural fields, the paper illustrates the motivations that have triggered a collaboration between the department of Computer Science[1] and the department of Performing Arts of the University of Milano [2] in order to develop this educational and entertaining system.

No abstract available.