Beyond that fancy logo Reaping the full benefits of design contributions
Channel: FOSDEM
Date: 07/03/2018

by Belen Barros Pena

At: FOSDEM 2017

Slides available at https://belenbarrospena.github.io/fosdem2017

The decision of creating a jobs board as part of the Open Source Designproject was no doubt an excellent one. Our conversations during the first OpenSource Design devroom showed that a place to match designers with FOSSprojects was sorely needed. At November 19th, the jobs board has received 53submissions. I consider this a success, given our limited reach and the smallsize of the Open Source Design initiative.

Going through the content of those 53 submissions shows a clear pattern: theoverwhelming majority are looking for graphic designers, and many of them areasking for a project logo.

Although graphic design is absolutely fundamental to software, and brandingelements such as logos help projects develop and strengthen their identity,user-centered design is much more than that, as the content of our devroomsillustrate. It is also important to understand that good graphic design doesnot exist in isolation: it is embedded within the work of other user-centereddesign disciplines and concerns.

User research, information architecture, interaction design and contentstrategy can make valuable contributions to FOSS projects. The question is,how? What needs to change for FOSS projects to identify the need of aninformation architect or a user researcher? Is it just about buildingknowledge and awareness about these branches of design? Or do thesedisciplines require some fundamental changes to the way contributions happen?

This talk is more about questions than answers. It will provide a briefintroduction to the different "layers" of the user-centered design process asoutlined by Jesse James Garrett(http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements.pdf), and will pose some questionsabout how to incorporate them into FOSS projects.

Finding the answers to those questions is one of the reasons why we need theOpen Source Design community.


Room: AW1.121
Scheduled start: 2017-02-05 08:30:00