Elevator Pitch
Open Design: increasing and sustaining design contribution to open source and advocating for OSS in design, and design in OSS. Covering the history and problems we looked to solve. We’ll present the learnings and tools that engage designers, not yet ‘on-board’ with OSS as an ethos or movement.
Description
Open Design is a collaboration between Adobe, Designit and Ushahidi. Looking at increasing and sustaining design contribution to open source and advocating for OSS in design, and design in OSS.
Ushahidi builds OSS humanitarian tools, remotely for some of the most marginalized people across the globe. To tackle these systemic problems with how to ‘open source’ a design effort and bring the community along with the ‘on-staff’ Ushahidi designers, we piloted a series of design events on Ushahidi’s OSS crisis communication tool TenFour with our partners Designit and Adobe. Together, we’re looking to solve the problems with how open source design can work by engaging through meaningful technology that makes a difference in the world.
In this session, we’ll briefly cover the history of the project and the main problems we attempted to solve and we’ll present the learning and adaptions to our workshop framework and methodology that aims to engage design teams and individuals that are not yet ‘on-board’ with OSS as an ethos or movement.
Looking into some the abstract deeper motivations for design professionals to contribute but also some practical tips on structuring issues, labelling and maintaining design (and extended functions like research, UX and product management) you’ll leave with a set of tools and methods you can apply to your OSS to engage with designers.
Notes
Lead the Open Design program at Ushahidi from 2018 to 2020. Part of the Open Source Design.net collective and a designer of 10+ years in the commercial, proprietary software world before moving into Open Source in 2017.