Doing Design in Open Source

Mark Boul­ton did the redesign of Drupal’s web­site and posted recently on the rela­tion­ship between design (both aethes­tic and UX) and devel­op­ment (pure coding).

I’m going to bypass his main point (I’m not sure I under­stood it) and focus on my dis­ap­point­ment with one of his points, namely that “Great design requires a sin­gu­lar vision.”

One of his com­menters sums up my dis­ap­point­ment nicely:

You say design needs a uni­fied vis­ion and can­not use the same com­munity approach that soft­ware devel­op­ment does. And you may be right. But I don’t think you can say that with cer­tainty, yet. Some peo­ple used and still do say the same thing about code. And they’re obvi­ously wrong. Community-​​based Open Source code devel­op­ment has been done for about 15–20 years now. Design has come into this arena only rel­at­ively recently (say 5 years) and in my view hasn’t tried hard enough to find the right meta­phor for itself to fit with the com­munity model…

Note this: open source is just now at the point where it’s really begin­ning to attract design­ers, where design­ers (who aren’t really devel­op­ers with a strong aes­thetic sense, but are peo­ple who are pas­sion­ate about design REGARDLESS of much or lit­tle they can code) are WANTING and feel able to contribute.

This goes back to the argu­ment I made a while ago about how the entry to the bazaar has to be low­ered to non-​​developers for open source to take the next big step (namely, pol­ish). That bar is cer­tainly lowering–the ques­tion is whether or not it’s low enough yet.

Peo­ple say that good design can’t come from an open source model. I’ll agree only that good great design hasn’t YET come from an open source model. But that’s because we haven’t seen the kind of per­fect storm that gave us the Linux kernel.

The com­menter goes on to write:

[Y]ou can only [become a mean­ing­ful part of the community]if you stay with the com­munity long enough (not for­ever, but longer than 2 years). And being a mem­ber of a com­munity (just like with fam­il­ies) is 2 parts frus­tra­tion and 1 part sat­is­fac­tion. Can you stay through peri­ods when your design vis­ion is being man­gled to try another day? Can you find a way of mod­u­lar­iz­ing your design so that enough can be pre­served, even if not of all of it is? Can you fig­ure out a way (a meta­phor really) of hav­ing a design API so that even new peo­ple can con­trib­ute to it (the sort of thing that hap­pens auto­mat­ic­ally in the small pro­ject teams you mention).

Design­ers com­plain that their ideas aren’t lis­tened to. But I don’t know that it’s true. They’re just not lis­tened to always or not accep­ted in full. Exactly the same thing hap­pens to developers.

In my hum­ble opin­ion, THIS is the real issue. Design­ers (like devel­op­ers) love their work. But open source demands com­pro­mise, or at least inte­gra­tion. And design­ers and artists’ work is tied too tightly to their egos–they’re not used to hav­ing their work man­gled by integration.

There’s a few say­ings I use as a poet to remind me how to be a write well:

* Can you pour gravy on it? (ie. is it con­crete?)
* Is it too showy? (or more often “show, don’t tell”)
* Why’d you use that? (ie. every­thing in a poem means some­thing)
* Some­times you gotta kill your babies (ie. some­times to get the poem right, you’ve got to edit out your favorite lines)

A good great poet knows how to sep­a­rate the work that’s being cre­ated from the work that your most proud of, from the work your ego’s tied to because the work your ego loves may or may not be the poem you’re try­ing to write. Some­times, you’ve got to kill your babies.

(Although, to be more hon­est, if you’re doing it right, you’re not killing those lines–you just slip them in a folder of ideas you’re sure are bril­liant that you’ll return to and mine later.)

In any case, the point here is that the cre­ation of great design, like great poetry, shouldn’t be tied to the design­ers ego.

The ques­tion the com­menter pro­poses is how can design­ers learn a new model for design, an open model, in which the work is per­ma­nently decou­pled from the con­tribut­ing design­ers’ (plural!) indi­vid­ual egos? It’s not impossible–it just hasn’t been done yet.