Aristotle's influential theory of design defined it by saying that the 'cause' of design was its final state. The idea of Metadesign acknowledges that future uses and problems cannot be completely anticipated at design time.
Metadesign, therefore, alludes to a design practice that (re)designs itself (see Maturana and Varela's term autopoiesis). Employed as a prefix, it explicitly denotes self-referentiality. The Greek word ' meta' originally meant 'beyond' or 'after' and is now sometimes used to imply a comprehensive, insightful self-awareness. This variety of approaches is justified by the myriad interpretations that can be derived from the etymological structure of the term. 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, 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. Nevertheless, there's a very active, but widely dispersed, group that base their activities at Maturana and Varela's approach.
Later on, a very active group was present at Politecnico di Milano, and several different universities and graduate programs began applying Metadesign in design teaching around the world generally based at Van Onck's approach, further developed at Politecnico di Milano. Since then, several different design, creative and research approaches have used the name "Metadesign", ranging from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's biological approach, to Gerhard Fischer's and Elisa Giaccardi's techno-social approach, and Paul Virilio's techno-policital approach. Metadesign has been initially put forward as an industrial design approach to complexity theory and information systems by Dutch designer Andries Van Onck in 1963, while at Ulm School of Design (later at Politecnico di Milano and Rome and Florence ISIA). Team members working in a metadesign workshop organized by researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London (2008) History
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