Host institution: University of Milan, Italy;   Lead supervisor: Piero Mussio: mussio AT dico.unimi.it

Description: Allowing users of interactive culture-specific (i.e., archaeology, fine arts, etc.) environments to become active and creative knowledge producers poses major challenges in creative design. The project addresses this challenge by focusing on knowledge creation, diffusion, and sharing through interactive systems. In this field, end-user development (EUD) and meta-design approaches provide useful strategies and tools for supporting creative interactions among users from different cultural domains.

The project aims to define EUD and meta-design methodology that enhance creative problem solving in cultural information and communication environments. Advanced data integration techniques will be studied to permit accessing data distributed among different sources, i.e. EU-funded TArcHNA project will provide access to these sources. The application domain is software design and the project involves meta-design approaches for creative problem solving, the semantic web, and web 2.0 technologies, together with advanced data integration techniques.

Outcomes: The project aims to produce a prototype that supports creative problem solving. Documents and papers will report on the methodology adopted, the details of implementation, and the results of usability tests to be performed on the prototype.