=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3685/short6
|storemode=property
|title=Technological Innovations and Cultural Changes for Engaging and Empowering End-Users
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3685/short6.pdf
|volume=Vol-3685
|authors=Gerhard Fischer
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/avi/Fischer24
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==Technological Innovations and Cultural Changes for Engaging and Empowering End-Users==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3685/short6.pdf
Technological Innovations and Cultural Changes for Engaging and
Empowering End-Users ⋆
Gerhard Fischer
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
Abstract
Engaging and empowering end-users has been a fundamental research objective of our Center for Lifelong
Learning and Design (L3D) for the last few decades. My contribution will document how a simplistic and
narrow initial understanding has evolved based on identifying the critical roles that end-users can and need
to play to address the wicked problems that individuals and communities are facing in the digital age.
Grounded in the analysis, the findings, and the assessment of specific frameworks and socio-technical
developments, research objectives, requirements, and design trade-offs are described to further refine the
concept of end-user in the age of AI ensuring that technological innovations contribute positively to cultural
evolution in an increasingly digital world.
Keywords
End-Users, AI, Large Language Models, ChatGPT
1. Early Insights and Empirical Foundations
This section will describe the development of conceptual frameworks, inspirational prototypes, and
empirical findings and insights that provided incentives and design requirements for our work in
L3D at CU Boulder for exploring the concepts of “end-users” and “end-user development” and their
different interpretations. "End-user development" (EUD) [2][31] is defined as a set of methods,
techniques, and tools that allow users to create, modify, or extend artifacts, applications, rules, and
regulations. The goal of EUD is to empower users to develop their own solutions, tailor applications
to better fit their personal or organizational needs, and participate more actively in the aspects of
their work or personal tasks.
1.1. Pinball Construction Set: The Importance of Domain Knowledge
In the “stone age” of personal computing (before 1.5 million Apps were available on Apple laptops),
we experimented with the Pinball Construction Set — a video game by Bill Budge written for the
Apple II and later released by Electronic Arts in 1983 (see Figure 1).
Our experiments with experienced programmers and sophisticated Pinball machine players
resulted in the finding that with minimal training the Pinball machine players constructed more
interesting and sophisticated games than the experienced programmers with limited knowledge
about playing with Pinball Machines.
These findings provided the rationale for the design requirement that application-domain
knowledge and support environments for human problem-domain interaction [14] are critically
important for many software systems. The application-domain knowledge is held by domain experts
Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age (CoPDA 2024): Differentiating
and Deepening the Concept of "End User" in the Digital Age, June 2024, Arenzano, Italy
gerhard@colorado.edu (G. Fischer)
0000-0001-8927-4363 (G. Fischer)
© 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
ceur-ws.org
Workshop ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings
rather than by software developers who suffer from a “thin spread of application domain knowledge”
[5].
Figure 1: The User Interface of the Pinball Construction Set.
1.2 Poorly Understood and Ill-defined Problems Cannot be Delegated
In our empirical work at L3D, we interviewed a variety of users of software systems who were not
primarily interested in software per se but who were engaged in professional activities that required
them to modify, extend, evolve, and create systems fitting their needs. Table 1 [11] documents one of
our interviews with a geo-scientist: the left column shows the comments of the scientist, and the right
column the interpretation of the comments for end-user development.
Table 1
Software development as an essential task for end-users
Statements by the Geo-Scientists Relevance for Deepening the Concept of ‘End User’
I spend in average an hour every day developing No software exists (despite 1.5 Mio Apps) or a
software for myself to analyze the data I collected potentially useful app is unknown to the user
because there is not any available software
Even if there is a software developer sitting next to me, Change is a constant and software needs to evolve
it would not be of much help because my needs vary as
my research progresses
I cannot clearly explain what I want to do at any Poorly understood, ill-defined problems cannot be
moment delegated and the owners of problems must have the
“authority” to change the problem.
If the software developer can manage to write a Externalizations need to “talk back” to the owners of
program for me, I will not know if he or she has done the problems
it right without looking at the code
I spent three months to gain enough programming Personally meaningful activities will encourage
knowledge to get by interest-driven learning
Software development has now become an essential End-users engage in programming because they
task of my research, but I do not consider myself a want to get their work done and programming is a
software developer and I don’t know many other mean rather than an end for them
things about software development.
The design insights and requirements grounded and derived from the interview shown in Table 1
and other empirical and theoretical work included:
• Putting Owners of Problems in Charge: Ill-defined problems cannot be delegated; therefore the
owner(s) of a problem need to be present in incrementally framing the problems, because
they have the “authority” to change the problem. If owners of problems are in charge, then
background assumptions do not need to be fully articulated [29]. It is a strength of domain
experts that they know the larger problem context, which enables them to solve ill-defined
design problems, to learn while solving problems, to notice similarities between design
problems, and to know when design rules can and should be broken.
• Support for Unselfconscious Cultures of Design: Alexander [1] introduced the distinction
between an unselfconscious and a self-conscious culture of design. In an unselfconscious
culture of design, the failure or inadequacy of the form leads directly to an action to change or
improve it. This closeness of contact between designers and products allows constant
rearrangement of unsatisfactory details. In unselfconscious design, breakdown and
correction occur side by side; the knowledge to repair breakdowns comes from the
knowledge of the user, who is best able to recognize a lack of fit, and how the artifact should
be changed to improve its fit to the environment.
2. Engaging and Empowering End-Users
2.1 Brief Summary of our System Developments
Figure 2 provides an overview of our developments in L3D to gain a multi-dimensional perspective
of the needs, roles, and contributions of end-users.
(1)
Domain-Oriented Design
Environments
(2) (3)
Diversity of End-Users Seeding, Evolutionary Growth,
Reseeding Model (SER)
Rich Ecologies of Participation
Renaissance
Upstream and
Downstream
Transcending and Deepening Communities
the Concept of “End-User”
(4)
(5)
Upstream Downstream
emphasis: framing of emphasis: solving of
wicked problems; coping tame problems;
with design-trade-offs verifying the correctness
Problems in
the World Specification Implementation
exploring alternatives fixing errors
Figure 2: Frameworks and Systems to Explore Different Roles and Engagement Opportunities for
End-Users.
• Domain-oriented design environments (DODEs) (1): DODEs put end-users (being the
owners of problems) in charge by supporting
o human problem-domain interaction rather than just human-computer interaction
[6];
o the co-evolution of problem framing and problem solving [27];
o an enriched back-talk of design situations with critics [18];
o reflection-in-action by making argumentation serve design [15];
• Diversity of End-Users and Rich Ecologies of Participation (2): the diagram represents the
different roles that users can have as contributors (e.g.: in open-source and in social media
environments [19][25]). The new emerging roles have been characterized as
o prosumers [30], who are techno-sophisticated and comfortable with the
technologies with which they grew up and they engage in experimenting,
exploring, building, tinkering, framing, solving, and reflecting about problems;
o professional amateurs [22], who are innovative, committed, and networked
amateurs working up to professional standards.
• The Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, Reseeding process (SER) Model (3): its focus is to
incrementally refine and evolve systems as living entities [13]. Instead of providing fixed
content, rules, and processes, system developers and end-users create seeds for open, living
information repositories which end-users can evolve by using the seed for their design
activities. If major modifications are required, reseeding efforts will take place.
• Differentiation of Upstream and Downstream Activities in Design Processes (4):
Upstream activities (focused on problem framing and resulting in a specification for a
problem) represent the most critical phase for end-user involvement. Since wicked problems
are ill-defined, understanding the problem from the perspective of those most affected is
crucial. End-users as owners of problems can provide invaluable insights into the nature of
the problem, its context, and its impact on their lives. Downstream activities (focused on
problem solving resulting in an implemented systems based on a specification) [13] will
contribute to the iterative refinement of solutions and the identification of errors.
• Support for “Renaissance Communities” and not only for “Renaissance Scholars” (5):
Based on the constraints on human abilities what people can learn during a lifetime, it is
unrealistic to expect from individuals to maintain the prerequisite knowledge in their
technological discipline, and at the same time to have the needed competence in the social
sciences and in domain-specific application domains [10][24].
2.1 Related Frameworks
Related frameworks to end-user development (complementing the ones mentioned in the previous
section) have been described in [2]:
• End-User Programming (EUP) focused on the objective of empowering and supporting end-
users to program (with techniques such as: programming by demonstration, visual
programming, scripting languages, and domain-specific languages)[26];
• End-User Software Engineering (EUSE) adding to EUP support for systematic and disciplined
activities for the whole software lifecycle (including: reliability, efficiency, usability, and
version control) [4].
The book "Democratizing Innovation" [32] contributes to the framing of the concept of end-users
by demonstrating with specific examples that end-users are not just the target audience for
technological products but are integral to the innovation process itself. The book highlights the
importance of open innovation and collaborative design processes, where users and producers co-
create solutions.
In the societal world at large in which governments create rules and regulations, the concept of
“Nudges” (based on human behavior and psychology) [31] postulates the principle of libertarian
paternalism in which officials create rules and regulations to guide human behavior. In doing so, they
act as “choice architects” (in analogy to meta-designers in our frameworks) influencing people's
behavior in a predictable manner without restricting their freedom, autonomy, empowerment, and
welfare of choice for the citizens (the “end-users” in this framework). In this approach, default
settings are chosen not just for convenience but to guide users towards more efficient and beneficial
options. Citizens retain their freedom of choice, but the design subtly influences their decisions in a
direction deemed positive by the designers.
3. End-Users in the Age of AI and ChatGPT
In the Age of AI (not just in the last few years but more or less from the very beginning) two distinct
approaches originated and emerged with separate traditions, values, priorities, and visions in the
computing world [17][23][28]:
• one being (strong) Artificial Intelligence (AI) to replace human beings, automating the human
experience, and duplicating human behavior with computing systems;
• the other being Intelligence Augmentation (IA) to expand and complement human abilities with
sociotechnical environments.
The emergence of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) during the last 18 months is
transforming how the role of end-users is perceived, expanding their capabilities, changing their
expectations, and reshaping their interactions with technology.
Research objectives and design trade-offs (focusing on ChatGPT as an example) that need to be
critically examined include promises such as that it will
• change our minds about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity really is
[16];
• enrich our understanding and increase the support for “distributed cognition” frameworks
[12][21];
• assist in generating ideas and offer alternative perspectives [8].
Equal attention needs to be given to analyzing pitfalls and hindrances [20] such as
• its fluency is an illusion that stems from the combination of massive amounts of data,
immense computing power, and novel processing techniques;
• its limited support for asking questions and framing problems;
• the difficulty for humans to scrutinize the answer produced;
• the fact that it hallucinates and gives wrong answers;
• its unreflective use leading to humans suffering from an overreliance on technology.
The design tradeoffs and balances between these advantages and disadvantages often depend on
the contexts in which ChatGPT is used, the specific needs of the users, and the evolving capabilities
of ChatGPT. As these tools continue to evolve, addressing the disadvantages while enhancing the
advantages represents a fundamental challenge.
A Narrative for Different Uses of ChatGPT: Personal Speechwriters. High-level politicians,
industry leaders, and other decision makers are using speechwriters to assist them in giving
presentations on a broad range of different topics. If one or more speechwriters provide a text and
the “important persons” deliver the speech by reading the text literally given to them — they engage
in the least demanding activity: all they need to be able to do is read.
What the listeners of the speech hope for and expect is that the “important persons” superimpose
their own ideas based on the ideas provided by the speech writers.
Most people writing an essay, a job application, or an admission letter for a university cannot
afford to have another human as a speech writer. They can use ChatGPT as their personal speech
writer in two fundamentally different ways:
• Behavior-1 (undesirable): use the text created by ChatGPT as their final product (governed by
an “AI versus Human” perspective)
or
• Behavior-2 (desirable): use ChatGPT to generate a first draft and then rewrite the texts to
reflect their own voices and experiences (governed by an “AI and Human” perspective). In
this case, ChatGPT can be a powerful tool by blending its computational power with human
intuition, expertise, and ethical judgment.
4. Future Directions
A core objective for the 2024 CoPDA Workshop “Differentiating and Deepening the Concept of “End
User” in the Digital Age” should be to explore what different AI approaches can contribute for
enriching our understanding of empowering end-users in the future and which developments will be
detrimental.
One drawback is that humans may be forced to cope with the burden of being active contributors
in personally irrelevant activities that can lead to participation overload as illustrated by (1) “do-it-
yourself” societies (e.g., companies offloading work to customers [3]) and (2) cultures of participation
[9]. Through modern tools, humans are empowered to perform many tasks themselves that were
done previously by skilled domain workers serving as agents and intermediaries. Although this shift
provides power, freedom, and control to customers, it also has forced people to act as contributors
in contexts for which they lack the experience that professionals have acquired and maintained
through the daily use of systems, as well as the broad background knowledge to do these tasks
efficiently and effectively.
The concept of the "end-user" has transformed from a simple role of consumption or operation to
a complex, dynamic participant in the design, development, and use of products and services. This
evolution reflects broader changes in technology, education, society, and the global economy,
underscoring the importance of continuously adapting our understanding of who end-users are,
what they need, and what they can contribute.
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