Software Shaping Workshops: Environments to Support End-User Development

In the Information Society, end-users keep increasing very fast in number, as well as in their demand with respect to the activities they would like to perform with computer environments, without being obliged to become computer specialists. There is a strong request of providing end-users with powerful and flexible environments, tailorable to the culture, skills and needs of very diverse end-user population. In this paper, we discuss a framework for End-User Development (EUD) and present our current work to design environments that support the activities of domain expert users, with the objective of easing the way these users work with computers. Such environments are called workshops in analogy to artisan workshops since they provide users with the tools, organized on a bench, that are necessary to accomplish their specific activities by properly “shaping” software artifacts