Post about Open Source vs Open Design

[GarthDB]

Open source is about the licensing, giving source to the community. Open design is about designing in the open. Both might have their place, but we should be clear what we are talking about.

There are more levels to open design than just those two. There are projects that just publish progress, but don't have a mechanism, or interest in community involvement. There is still value in that.

[scattershot-code]

Open Design could also be about giving away the data and the final specifications using an open license so other people can use the data to create different designs based on the same data.

[GarthDB]

@dncnmckn do you have an example?

[scattershot-code]

Sure,
Open Data to do with what you will: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2013/jan/14/all-our-datasets-index
Open Design final specifications: Novena. Open Source Laptop: http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page

Hope that helps.

[una]

I agree about the being clear here -- I see designing in the open (aka "designing out loud") much different than designing in the open source community.

For me, I see 3 main ways that "open source design" can we defined:

1. Designing "in the Open" --> showing your progress as you go. Fro, ideation to sketching and not hiding anything or saying "but it's not ready yet!"
2. Open sourcing your designs for others to use (icon sets, themes, layouts, stock photography, vector graphics, etc.)
3. Design as part of the open source community (like here on Github). Designers working with developers from the start.

I think this site is focused on the 1st definition, which I think is great. I've personally become really interested in bolstering the 3rd one.

[GarthDB]

@una so glad to have you joining the discussion. I agree with you - the 3rd is the ultimate goal for me as well, but every designer could be more open, which hopefully will prepare them for participating in open source projects.

[una]

👍 they definitely go hand in hand

[GarthDB]

I touch on it a bit in the video.

[GarthDB]

Actually I went heavy on open source and realized not every designer is ready to open source, but they are more likely to practice open design. So glad to have your desire for true open source design.

[una]

I've talked to a lot of devs and designers about this recently and I'm writing a post for this about barriers for designers to open source. Even contributing to this repo, there are several assumptions: i.e. knowing about Github workflow (even having a Github account to fork in the first place), knowing Jekyll, knowing about installing gems, etc.)

[GarthDB]

YES! Tooling is a big barrier, but not a lasting problem. Pixelapse, layervault, and even GitHub themselves seem to be working on the problem. Until then I'd love to put together more educational material for designers to get involved in these workflows and for developers to learn to design.

[Skud]

FWIW I tend to conceive of open source as being about three things, only one of which is licensing:

1. open source is a political movement that aims to change the power balance between software producers and users
2. open source achieves this through licensing; licenses embody and clarify the rights and responsibilities of software producers and users, and are the main tool for changing the power balance
3. with the power balance changed, open source enables and fosters collaboration; this has led to the development of powerful collaboration tools and techniques by the open source community

(This is roughly a summary of a blog post I wrote a while ago: http://blog.growstuff.org/2013/02/20/why-growstuff-is-open-source/)

What's the equivalent for open design?

[una]

I really like that blog post! Have you considered writing an article for Design Open?

[GarthDB]

@Skud I think there is some of the same. (great article btw)

1. The political movement isn't quite the same, there isn't a question of producers and users, though there could be something said for combatting the corporate mentality of for profit as opposed to for the user within design.
2. The licensing is a big part of it. There are a lot of designers that are shelving designs they didn't use, or releasing them as freebies without proper licensing. The cc licensing is good, but what about creative content that is also code? For example, this blog is open source, the content is cc0, but what about the code that is being used to generate the static site, is that even worth open sourcing? It's pretty much just a Jekyll site with some css (or sass). Is CSS creative content or code?
3. For me collaboration should be the biggest goal for open design. Since designers do not typically have the skills to create tools, we haven't seen many built to solve design collaboration problems the same way development problems have been solved. More than that, collaboration hasn't been a part of design culture the same way it has been for development. It's a 2 fold issue, tools/workflows, and industry attitude. Things are changing, mainly from the influx of designer/developer hybrids.

These are just my musings, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it @Skud.

[Skud]

I'm working towards an article about trying to create a stronger design
culture at Growstuff, and was thinking of asking whether it would be an
appropriate thing to crosspost. Would you be interested?

On 19/12/2014 7:39 am, Una Kravets wrote:

I really like that blog post! Have you considered writing an article
for Design Open?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#24 (comment).

Alex "Skud" Bayley
[email protected]
http://infotrope.net

[GarthDB]

@Skud We are always interested in getting more articles, especially from other points of view and experience.

[GarthDB]

If you want editorial help let us know, otherwise make a pull request if you want to publish something on Design Open.

[Skud]

@GarthDB in response to your political/license/collab ideas:

1. This may come across strangely, and I hope I can express it without causing offence; please let me know if I am being awful. When I think about power relationships between designers and others (businesses/clients, coders, end-users, etc), I get the impression that designers are in many cases less powerful/privileged. Outside of a few niches, design work is often not respected, not paid for, etc. This is a constant refrain I hear when I look around the design-y parts of the internet. So it seems to me that if you wanted to take a power-differential approach to this, it wouldn't be so much about giving up existing power. "Open" movements are often about doing that explicitly (think eg. "open government"), and that's where a lot of my thinking comes from. But "open" also has the power to disrupt powerful institutions from the grassroots -- think "Wikipedia" -- where thousands of people giving away what tiny bit of power/privilege they have (the intellectual property they hold over a few paragraphs of prose) can aggregate into a powerful force. The open design situation feels more like the latter to me.
2. I think one of the interesting differences b/w code and design is that in closed-source software, the code is hidden and can't be studied/reused/adapted/shared; this is enforced through IP protection (copyright, closed-source licenses). With design, the results at least can be studied/adapted (eg. you can learn from a design that works well) though the process remains obscure. Therefore, when you're looking at opening things up, it's more about the process and the stuff that's created along the way, than the finished product. How can you license a journey?
3. You say that designers can't build collab tools, but a lot of what passes as collaboration in open source is not always tools. We have a bunch of cultural and social norms and practices that we've developed as well. Take for instance the Apache practice of measuring consensus by posting "+1" or "-1" on mailing lists. This is extremely low-tech, no tools required. Another example would be the open source community's overall level of comfort with asynchronous communications, to deal with the exigencies of timezones and variably-available volunteers.

[GarthDB]

@Skud you are not being awful at all.

1. I agree. Designers are often undervalued and overworked. I think this might be a large contributor to the collaboration problem. If you are undervalued you have to spend most of your time proving your worth, which causes you to compete with threats (rather than collaborate), and motivates you to overwork and burnout.
2. This is true as well. There is some correlation though. Designers, in the name of ip, tend to guard source files and process. I can learn a lot about how a designer works by looking at the source psd/ai/sketch file. Usually good designers become proficient in reverse engineering designs they imitate.
3. I agree on this point too. If people want to collaborate, tools don't make that possible, it just makes it easier. I think the attitude of designers (influenced by work conditions mentioned in the first point) is the biggest barrier.