Metadesign

Metadesign (or meta-design) is an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating social, economic and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place.

As a methodology, its aim is to nurture emergence of the previously unthinkable as possibilities or prospects through the collaboration of designers within interdisciplinarity 'metadesign' teams.

More recently, some efforts have been made to systematize Metadesign as a structured creative process, such as (1) Fischer's and Giaccardi's and (2) Caio Vassão's academic works,[2][3] among several others, based on a much wider reference frame, ranging from post-structuralist philosophy, Neil Postman's media ecology, Christopher Alexander's pattern languages and deep ecology.

This teleological perspective is similar to the orthodox idea of an economic payback at the point of sale, rather than successive stages when the product could be seen to achieve high levels of perceived value, throughout the whole design cycle.

By harnessing creative teamwork within a suitable co-design framework, some metadesigners have sought to catalyse changes at a behavioural level.

[6] This tends to reduce the semantic certainty of roles, actions and descriptors within a given team,[7] making it necessary to rename particular shared experiences that seem inappropriately defined.