Michael Demetriou

Design is more than usability testing and click analytics. Design always carried the dominant ideas of the era and championed them, forming cultures along the way. Today's design is immensely influenced by Steve Jobs and his "Just Works" and "Automagically" mantras. While recognizing the significance of the democratization of technology, it was done in a way that for the first time completely hides the way things work from their users. In fact it goes to great lengths to lock users out of their gadgets.

Open source is about, among other things, freedom to study. In this spirit open source design isn't only about the sources of design documents, it's about facilitating the study of the inner workings: Let's create designs that are easy to use yet teach the user how the system we are designing works. Informed users will be able to better understand why a result is not what they expected, will be able to solve more of the possible problems, and the result is being happier both with the system and with themselves.

In this presentation, we will study how design was once overtly political, along with a few notable historical design movements, analyze the current state of design, how it came to be and its effects on human intellect, and then propose a new design direction inspired in part by video games where the goal isn't to blindly guide our users to their goal, but teach them how to achieve what they need, using our software as a tool and make feel rewarded with the results of their efforts, and not the results of an "automagical" piece of software.

Inspired by the phrase 'We mean design in the broadest sense' on opensourcedesign.net, this talk will discuss what are the opportunities and barriers of introducing open source mentality and workflow in domains of design that aren't software related. Engineering, architecture, even print and product design can all benefit from the open source way as born and developed in the software world. The current state, the arguments that can counter the common reservations and the possible barriers for introducing open source in a design shop.

Slides: http://play.qwazix.com/fosdem16/

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Inspired by the phrase 'We mean design in the broadest sense' on opensourcedesign.net, this talk will discuss what are the opportunities and barriers of introducing open source mentality and workflow in domains of design that aren't software related. Engineering, architecture, even print and product design can all benefit from the open source way as born and developed in the software world. The current state, the arguments that can counter the common reservations and the possible barriers for introducing open source in a design shop.

The focus of the talk will be on the Engineering and Architectural design which have the most potential for an effective introduction to open source workflows and publication of final works. The relationship with the clients, equipment manufacturers and the state, the nature of the most common projects and the current mentality of professionals all play their role in the success or failure of an open source model of work.

Designing in the open has inherent difficulties as the danger of producing a camel always lurks. At the same time the status quo in mobile UI is consumption-oriented. These are the big challenges we face when working on Glacier UI for nemomobile and I believe they are worth talking about.

This talk starts with a brief introduction on ways to handle the risk of losing the vision and coherence of the design while still fostering participation, and how we are trying to do that on the nemomobile project. Being friendly and accepting proposals and at the same time keeping a grip on the focus of the design, in a project that lives exclusively on contributors' free time: compromises, solutions and ideals. A quick overview of the tools and workflow follows, and the rest of the presentation delves into the specifics of mobile OS interface design and how we try to evolve a mobile UI that enables productivity on a small screen as opposed to mere content consumption, with Glacier UI.

For more information on nemomobile and Glacier UI visit http://play.qwazix.com/grog/