Beyond Sharing: Open Source Design

Keywords: design, collaboration, interface, community

“Design by committee”, “too many cooks in the kitchen” and other terms have been used derogatively to imply that the creative process breaks when it involves too many individuals. At the same time, the software world has been completely revolutionized by the open source, networked collaborative process. When it comes to graphic and interaction designs (two fields critical to software development) Open Source software seem to lag behind the more conventional production models. It seems like in design the Open Source community have not managed to nourish robust collaboration models. One could argue that even successful free software design projects like Firefox or Ubuntu are often developed in a more traditional process. What are the challenges of networked collaboration in the creative process? Can and how might they be solved? Or is it just that designers don’t like to work together?

I will be tackling these questions in the light of my collaborative work as founding designer of ShiftSpace.org and my educational research leading the Open Source Design class at Parsons’ AAS Program in Graphic Design.

6mins version of this talk is available here: http://www.mushon.com/2009/12/18/shortaudio-my-open-source-design-slides/

*Disclaimer: I am not a Debian community insider, that's a part of what I want to talk about.