Intro to Open Design

We started Open Design to try to begin to investigate and solve the question of specifically, ‘Why aren’t there more designers in Open Source?’

We started the Open design project which was a collaboration between Ushahidi, Adobe and Global design agency Designit to start to understand why designers and, by extension other digital functions like product management, data analysts etc. aren’t participating as actively in OSS as those who code are.

A lot of what we learned about designers trying to move into and thrive in OSS spaces apply to other functions that are characterised by ‘not predominantly coding based’

Open design is a project that was born from these three organisations wanting to make a difference in the OSS space with the design community through investigation, tools, methodology and frameworks.

Even if designers know OSS, Github can be a barrier.

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.

Most OSS projects understand design as ‘logos’ and ‘graphics’.

When speaking with people that work on OSS projects and ‘maintain’ them. They often hear ‘design’ and immediately think either:

Logos
Graphics and icons
UI

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.

You can apply this level of understanding of design to the level of understanding about any other aspect of a humanitarian project. Programs, Research, M&E. When we don’t make spaces for people with these expertises to contribute to OSS we limit the capacity for Humanitarian OSS to succeed in a community-led building way.

OSS project issues can be restrictive…

But a problem in OSS is that typically the pieces of work, called ‘issues’ are very specific and very granular tasks. An example might be ‘Design a form capture for new volunteers that includes Name, Email and Address’ This ‘issue’ is largely dictating what is needed and leaves little room for exploration of what is the core need.

Why is this form needed? Why those data points? How should this be stored?

Designers in particular need the context surrounding a task or problem to effectively design for it in a sustainable way. Not all designers operate this way but the ones that have a healthy amount of curiosity about the wider impact of what they design.

As a predominantly coders space OSS issues sometimes lack a flexibility that could offer a different kind of solution to the proposed problem. There’s also the risk that you won’t engage the designers wide skill set, user insight and contextual design expertise as well as lacking in enthusiasm.

That’s if there are issues for design (or other functions!) at all in the project!

Lack of version control in software and process for designers.

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.