A presentation at Ladies that UX Tokyo in December 2019 in Tokyo, Japan by Eriol Fox
Welcome to this talk Design for good is opening up: Our journey into design contribution for Humanitarian OSS which is about Open Source Design with OSS Humanitarian Tech Tools.
We’ll be talking through Open Design, a collaboration between Ushahidi, Adobe and Designit from 2018 to 2019.
My name is Eriol Fox. I use They/Them/Their’s pronouns and I’m a designer at Ushahidi.
I’ve been working in the digital product design and UX space for the last 10 years, since before UX had a name.
I’ve also been involved in Humanitarian work and community work for 7 years and 2 years in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Space)
Ushahidi was founded in 2007/8 in the aftermath of election turmoil in Kenya.
Ushahidi’s mission and subject matter expertise is in building communication technology to empower people to raise their voices while delivering tools to help organisations better listen and respond with a dedication to providing FOSS (Free and open-source software) to those organisations, communities and individuals trying to make a difference where they are when they cannot afford to use commercial software to raise voices.
Ushahidi platform is most commonly used for advocacy, transparency, corruption and accountability monitoring, disaster response, election monitoring, human rights abuse reporting, measurement and evaluation, and environmental monitoring, and other subject areas.
The example seen in the slide here is when there was an earthquake in Nepal. A series of community organisations in Nepal used Ushahidi’s data collection platform to co-ordinate and organise relief efforts that were led by the communities. The Nepalese army used this information to send helicopter aid to areas worst affected. This is the direct positive result when you empower a community with the technology tools, knowledge and practices needed to respond to crisis.
Our second tool, the one we focus on for Open Design is TenFour. This is a crisis communication tool used to collect responses to emergency messaging in a single place so you can more easily see who is safe and who needs help. This tool was created in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on a weekend in a mall in Nairobi in 2013. We had staff visiting the mall and we had no idea if they were safe or not. We tried calling, texting, messaging and couldn’t confirm if they were safe.
Thankfully they were safe but many people lost their lives that day. We wanted to create a tool that helped people understand who was safe in dire circumstances to try to streamline communication and relief but also alleviate panic.
Ushahidi tools have been used all around the world. Here in Japan you can see people and communities mapping the heavy snow in 2014 to try to keep people informed and safe.
Here a report says ‘Gunma prefecture Ueno village record heavy snow measures’ with resources and an image available to the public.
Here we can see a person has sent in their own photo to the 2014 heavy snow deployment.
When communities are able to share and come together to keep each other safe it not only helps with an event or crisis but helps strengthen and solidify those communities for the future.
Essentially Open Source Software (OSS) is in some way, free to use software so a person does not need to pay to use it. It could be as complex or simple software. Sophisticated or rudimentary. It could also be projects or text-based information that is available under ‘OSS’.
OSS typically has a certain license that means that anybody can take the source material and use and/or change it to suit their needs. Sometimes there are suggested rules or backed-up or ‘enforced’ rules around using the OSS. e.g. if you make a change that could help someone else you add that change back into the ‘master’ software.
OSS is full of a lot of techie terminology like ‘master’ ‘source’ ‘push/pull’ and ‘git’ and this is because primarily the community has comprised of people who make and build software like people who code.
It can be hard to participate and feel welcomed or included if you don’t ‘speak this language’ if you are say, a designer.
Here are some links for finding out more about OSS communities in Asia but also a good article from the organisation Red Hat about ‘what is OSS’
opensource.com fossasia.org redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-source
What are we trying to do with Open Design?
Open design is a collaboration project between Ushahidi, Adobe and Global design agency Designit.
Open design is a project that was born from these three organisations wanting to make a difference in the FOSS space with the design community through investigation, tools, methodology and frameworks.
Designers collaborating and contributing to Humanitarian OSS and tech for good at challenge gatherings.
In 2018 and & 2019 we piloted two design jams where we tested whether bringing together designers around Ushahidi’s crisis communication tool TenFour to look at challenges local to Berlin and Seattle which were floods and landslides.
We put out a public event once in Berlin as a stand alone organised event and in Seattle at a conference called IXDA: one of many design events for interaction designers from around the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX1HZOtN2Js
These are projects that make them feel as though they are contributing to something net positive for the global and using their design skills to help others in need.
We discovered that there are a huge amount of designers working in corporations and for-profits wanting to work on a project in their ‘spare time’.
But when you have a challenge that is is not directly attached to a specific feature, issue or scope of work for the OSS technology and then designers tend to create designs not grounded in the reality of the current technology function often called ‘Design fiction’.
But on the other hand, simply having an event where designers work on issues (like many code-related OSS hackathons) risked not engaging the designer’s wide skill set, user insight and contextual design expertise as well as lacking in enthusiasm.
What we wanted to figure out is how to achieve actionable design contribution to current issues/tickets in the OSS repo while engaging designers in the OSS’s purpose.
When we started to dig deeper into the investigation process of Open Design we asked ourselves this question.
There are several reasons but I’ll only cover 4 for now.
If you’ve heard of it then it’s probably through some reference to coding. Perhaps you had a developer or someone who codes speak about it with you or in a setting where you were involved. But unless this was introduced to you and explained most likely it was a term that was regarded as ‘developer jargon’
If designers do know about OSS the pathways, communities and routes to be passionately involved in OSS are difficult to find. Though there are active communities like Open Source Design: https://opensourcedesign.net/
Formal and informal design education (like university degrees and colleges) do not teach designers what OSS is and how design can be involved. Some universities and courses are making an effort to include OSS in their curriculum though, like the Design of Interactive Media Systems at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt in Germany.
Agency/Inhouse/organisation not promoting it as a viable source of development for design skills and also not valuing OSS design contributions as part of a designer’s portfolio when interviewing.
Github sends a message in the way that it’s set up that suggests it’s a place only for those who can code in some way.
Historically, that may be the case but more and more designers or coders are becoming hybrids or interested in the process of how tech is built.
But while people who code might learn how to use Github, terminal and how to set up their own repos to look at OSS project designers aren’t often equipped with the knowledge on how to do this or even the ways in which to find comprehensive guides in order to set up an instance. If a designer can’t see or experience the OSS through a ‘user facing’ interface or if there are parts of the OSS that are inaccessible unless you can set up an instance then that’s a part the designer will not have access to in order to contribute.
Currently the hiring design industry doesn’t see much in the way of OSS design contribution. Preferring a ‘personal/passion projects’ approach and un-paid internships. This is a problem in many industries including development/coding (especially when you’re junior)
Often the perception of Design is that because it’s visual that it’s ‘fun and not a job or work’
Designers are becoming more finely attuned to this and if they don’t know about the ethos of OSS, they can mis-understand the request for contributions as a ‘Free work’ request.
There’s a process in coding and software development called ‘version control’ which is where multiple people can work from a single source at a time by ‘branching’ their own contained version of the main project to work on and then merge that branch into the main source when they’ve finished.
However, if another person in their own ‘branch’ has worked on the same part but done something slight different a lot of ways of coding will flag and show notifications for ‘conflicts’ and ask the people involved to take a look at the conflicts and reconcile them. This is how software developers stop overwriting each other work while working on code on their own machines and it’s also part of the way they track and maintain ‘versions’ of the project.
In design theres no real way to know if another designer working on the same project has changed something in a file that you have also changed. You have to create a whole seperate file, have a conversation and point out the differences and discuss them. This is also often why designers tend to work on separate parts of a project than the same to avoid conflicting or duplicate design work. We need ways to work with this remotely across timezones and borders if design for OSS is to be successful but also, as designers, understand that someone looking at our ‘master’ design file and changing something to suggest something better isn’t a threat to our design but a way of collaborating and globalizing our design to make it better and more relevant for everyone around the world.
Versioning for designers means digging into why sometimes we are particular and precious about holding our design files tight an not allowing them to be more flexible and participatory.
When speaking with people that work on OSS projects and ‘maintain’ them. They often hear ‘design’ and immediately think either:
This leaves out a huge part of why design is becoming one of the most needed functions in software recently. Design can offer so much to digital (and non-digital) products and projects than the visual design.
But, just like development and software has it’s own jargon and ‘club’ mentality so the hidden jargon and world of design has been hard for others to break into. Leaving a limited and short sighted view of what design can offer an OSS project.
This view of design is not to be scoffed and mocked at. It’s to understand and work towards how we can as a design community open up are practices and the benefits of our craft of design to those that are just beginning to learn how it can help OSS.
Building connections & Partnerships with organisations already doing parts of the design process openly, or in open source technology well already.
(we’re not looking to re-invent the wheel)
Organisations listed on the slide include:
The Hague Hacks Open Source Design Open Ideo Global Virtual Design Sprints Adobe Designit Design for Bharat
and many more organisations and individual advocates we’re discovering.
github.com/ushahidi/opendesign
We keep all our work done on Open Design in our Open Repository (a place to store OSS projects).
If designers want to get involved in OSS projects then we need more OSS projects involved with us!
In Bengaluru we focussed on how designers working on TenFour (Ushahidi’s crisis communication tool) could help people affected by floods.
In Taipei we focussed on how designers working on TenFour (Ushahidi’s crisis communication tool) could help farmers affected by Typhoons.
In Nairobi we intend to focus on how designers working on TenFour (Ushahidi’s crisis communication tool) could help people in terrorist situations.
In London we intend to focus on how designers working on TenFour (Ushahidi’s crisis communication tool) could help people in tower fires and urban settings.
In 2020 we want to work in more cities and communities across the globe on different OSS projects.
These design activities help both the designers better understand what the OSS projects are really asking for help with by pulling apart a real issue in the repo and working on best practice UX research and design thinking activities in collaborative groups.
The OSS projects get a real idea of how valuable design is beyond ‘just buttons’ or ‘just UI’ or ‘just logos’
To help increase and sustain design contributions to OSS tools like Ushahidi.
To support a community of collaborative, peer-led designers who learn skills and new ways of working together.
To build the understanding of OSS in the design community as alternative to ‘speculative’ ‘design for free projects especially for early career designers.
To help OSS projects understand design beyond graphics and UI and into the broad skills design can offer OSS.
To support OSS projects in building and receiving design contributions that are meaningful to their projects.
opendesign.ushahidi.com
Twitter: @opendesignis @erioldoesdesign
Ushahidi OSS repos https://github.com/ushahidi/platform https://github.com/ushahidi/tenfour
