Elevator Pitch
Documentation is critical for contributors understand how to contribute and users know what it is your software does, but how well is documentation designed? How do you create a space for designers to contribute and write docs for you?
We’ll look into these two aspects of design + documentation.
Description
The Open Source Software space is growing to become even more inclusive of functions not traditionally represented in OSS (typically being software development ‘coding’ or developer-focused skills) but this is still an emerging, growing part of OSS where norms and best practice are still being explored and developed. OSS is a good testing ground for documenting design, but In the corporate/commercial/proprietory tech world, how does design participate in documentation? What even is design documentation? What do we include? exclude? how do we format and explain the documentation? How do we demystify the design process and function in order to make it accessible to more people regardless of their function? I’ve been participating in OSS from a design perspective for 3 years now and have begun to develop my own practice of documenting design and sharing what I found works well in certain OSS contexts. I believe these can be applied broadly to any organisation or company that include designers of all types and I want to open up the conversation about what design documentation can do, more broadly, for the design sector in terms of openness, understanding and acceptance of our role in building great tools, tech and experiences.
Notes
Technical requirements: A laptop with internet access or use of my own laptop for in-person events. Ability to share the screen for online events. Using keynote or google slides. Please let me know if you need a .ppt or .pdf format.
In-person: Use of a clicker is helpful.
Expertise: I’ve been contributing to OSS for around 3 years now, purely as a designer and one of the key aspects of that is writing design documentation and creating some best practice for a function which is underserved and represented in the oss/documentation space. I recently tested a talk about design documentation at IxDA: Port Harcourt online which you can view here: https://vimeo.com/434779810#