The Open Design partnership between Ushahidi, Adobe XD and Designit began in June 2018 and during 2019 we’ve been able to test our theories, processes and frameworks, learn fascinating details about how designers want to participate in open source software and begin to build the open source design community alongside passionate and dedicated collaborators in the space.
The learnings from Open Design are numerous, detailed and complex. Many of the ways in which design and open source work towards the future are tangled with each other in such a way that makes it difficult to progress one aspect within simultaneously progressing another.
We’ve chosen five of our takeaways from Open Design to go into deeper detail, but there is much more to be learned. You can find our raw notes from our workshops in Bangalore and Taipei in our Open Design repo and you can take a look at several talks we’ve given on Open Design at IxDA’s Interaction 20, Open Up Global Summit (video) and Open Source Community Africa Festival.
We learned this relatively early on in our investigation on the subject of design contributions in open source from our conversations with Open Source Design.net communities, Nathan Waterhouse formerly involved in OpenIDEO and Claire Leunissen and Steen Bentall of The Hague Hacks.
This can be tricky because most Open Source Software, even those that aren’t ‘free’ do good. These OSS tools are often the foundations of the web and created to make the web more accessible, simple and varied to build on. The fact that OSS supports a huge amount of online services, websites and platforms is astounding but many designers (and otherwise) aren’t aware of this and the good this does for the open web. This is a difficult and nuanced topic to grasp if you’re entering into OSS for the first time through a function like design which is under-represented and frankly, takes time and energy to engage in. The design community wants to be able to see a clear path for their contribution and see the meaning associated with that. Humanitarian OSS offers this clear way of understanding ‘for good purpose’ in reasonably well-understood terms. When designers hear ‘Humanitarin OSS that helps with crisises like typhoons, floods and terrorism’ they can understand how beneficial its is to helping use design to solve these complex humanitarian problems without the need for an in-depth lecture on Open Source Software.
Be sure your OSS project that you want to apply Open Design to has this clear humanitarian message and purpose, it allows for the designers to enter on an even field of care and understanding without technical ‘jargon’ exclusion.
When planning how to make Open Design workshops as effective as possible, we spent time understanding and developing the importance of location. For the Open Design workshops post our ‘pilots’ in Berlin and Seattle we chose to be part of design or tech conferences in countries that had documented and regular occurrences with crises. Many countries around the world experience crisis, sometimes with a stark regularity but we wanted to look outside of Europe and the US for the design communities working within some of the most affected areas. We discussed our plans with DesignUP! In Bangalore and Open UP Global Summit in Taipei.
In Bangalore, we wanted to focus on the recent 2018 and 2019 Kerala floods that devastated the south west part of India. We had experience with groups through our ongoing work at Ushahidi and felt like we understood the needs of an OSS tool like TenFour in flooding scenarios well. Similarly in Taipei, we were able to draw on Ushahidi’s experience of typhoon recovery across SouthEast Asia to understand the key challenges and how to communicate them to a design audience in the workshops.
When you bring the elements of humanitarian purpose into a location that is specific to that purpose the design response to the workshop content enhances and you can find expertise and experience in the room that you would not otherwise have found if you’d conducted an Open Design workshop in a location not specific to that community and that humanitarian subject.
We found that ‘witnesses’ were critically essential to the process of Open Design workshops. Witnesses are what Open Design call our ‘users’, those that first hand experienced the humanitarian crisis subject matter. We reached out to key individuals ahead of time to prepare them for the Open Design workshop format, brief them on the challenges and what was needed of them. The ‘witnesses’ spend 30-60 minutes with the workshop attendees giving testimonies of their experience with the humanitarian subject matter. This, like most experience with users, offers the designers the unique and highly valued opportunity to engage with the subject matter directly. The witnesses stay for the duration of the workshop to answer questions, validate designers assumptions and offer insight into the humanitarian subject. They then are the key individuals offering feedback to the designers contributions to the OSS (typically a clickable prototype).
The designers find this interaction immensely valuable as do the witnesses. As Open Design invited the witnesses to the workshop, we ensure they are compensated for their time and expertise.
Tooling is a tricky subject when speaking about open source design contributions to OSS. There are many differing opinions depending on your values and knowledge base. Open Design takes the stance that the OSS defines how they would best like to receive contributions (Ushahidi/TenFour use Adobe XD and prefer to receive their contributions in that format). However, as Open Design progresses it is important to understand that there are barriers to tooling that can be financial, legal, technical and experience based. In essence, Open Design is tooling agnostic and we encourage design contribution over dictating what tool should be used. We’d rather there be a tangible contribution of design than not.
Versioning is done through written documentation and record keeping by the attendees and hosted in the Open Design repository. However, most designers find the concepts of versioning and documentation new, and as such are included in the workshop as part of their learning process. In further iterations of Open Design documentation hygiene and practices would need to be refined to ensure decision making outside of the ‘in-person’ workshop format could be sustained.
A key success element of Open Design was the process of taking existing ‘issues’ in a repository and re-framing them as design challenges. You can see an example used in the Taipei Open Design workshop here. We recognise that currently, OSS issues are not written for designers as the main consumers and they can find the solutions focussed, technical language hard to parse. We took existing issues from the TenFour repository and wrote them as design challenges, where we focused on the problem that we needed help solving, the users that we expect to be designing for and some breakdowns of the interactions that may happen within this challenge. We offered up constraints to the designers, to limit the ‘design fiction’ ideas that can often manifest when designers collaborate to solve a problem as well as a comprehensive design system file with existing screens and functionality of the OSS they are contributing too.
Many attendees of Open Design workshops were either recently out of education or still part of formal or informal education. As such their journey into design as a whole was as new as their journey with open source design contributions. Many expressed a desire to learn about OSS in their education process alongside their fellow students and with the support of teachers, lecturers and an institution. Similarly, many educational leaders approached Open Design questioning how this could be part of their education courses and saw the benefit of students and early career designers building their portfolios more with real (OSS) projects and less with fictional, speculative design briefs.
The opportunities that design contribution to OSS offers that regular fictional briefs don’t was clear to both students and teachers. The opportunity to work in multifunctional teams on real-world problems and products and have a tangible outcome was highly regarded.
If OSS and Open Design were to become part of our formal and informal design education, there emerged a simultaneous challenge with the design workplace and how design contribution to OSS could be viewed by potential employers. If these organisations hiring designers themselves have little to no understanding of OSS generally and the benefits to the growth of design contributions, we could see design portfolios full of design contributions being overlooked, misunderstood at worst, dismissed entirely.
For Open Design to participate in education a parallel consideration for the workplaces that hire would need to be explored.
Developers contributing to OSS have had many years headstart on designers and many other software functions with contributing to OSS. With Open Design we adding to and building up on the work of organisations like Open Source Design.net, Tech4Good, Global Design Sprints and OpenIDEO to encourage a community minded, collaborative spirit that OSS has had for many years.
As open source design contributions increase, the need for a community of support increases along with it. When designers seek out contributing to OSS for the first time they expressed the need to have someone who has walked this path previously to offer insight, support and mentorship.
This needs to be a global effort because there is so much to be learned and shared by the global design community. Design contributions through projects like Open Design can be one of the many access points into a collaborative, encouraging community but it will only be as successful as you make community cohesion a priority. Consistency, communication and collaboration between designers globally, emerged as a need for Open Design workshops and open source design contribution advocacy generally. The bridge between designer, OSS and humanitarian purpose being ideal but not a strict rule.