FactoryCity

Sylvain Hellegouarch said

I don’t quite see how that’s much different than any other aspect of software development. Open source, I mean The source code, encourages creativity but quite usually in a secretive fashion in a first step. Once a project becomes heavier, more looked at, it automatically slows down some of this creativity.

As you say yourself in your previous poste:

> So the problem with open source design is not the feedback (designers et al should be grateful when it comes) but with the ego issues that are wrapped up in how feedback is delivered and how it’s received. And these are ultimately social issues.

Well that can be said to other parts of software development. I’m not actually buying the idea than design would be some kind of distinct, grand, area where only by working on your own makes your work any better on the long run. To me doing so is essential only in the first step, where mocking up an idea is very personal, but so is prototyping your code.

> Thus when I talk about openness, I really mean openness from an economic/competitive perspective.

That’s fine but open source and economic openness are orthogonals. They may meet but usually in a one way fashion “we use open source software to create open economy but we don’t actually produce better, more creative open source software”.

Mark Jaquith said

It’s takes guts for an Open Source developer to say “no, the community is wrong, we’re doing it this way”… but that’s often what you should do, if you really care about the project.

If you have the right vision, it’ll pay off. This isn’t anything against openness or community involvement. This doesn’t mean that you shut yourself off to the community. There are just certain things that work better if you hand them to a person or a very small group of people with a cohesive creative vision. With regards to freedom, people are aways free to fork the software if their vision differs so much from yours, but the idea is, like you said, that they’ll value the improved experience so much that their design quibbles will seem trivial.

WordPress struggles with maintaining the right balance. Within the last year or so, we’ve been heading in two directions: soliciting more design feedback, but making more design decisions within the inner circle. Compare WordPress 2.7 to the more ad hoc assembled WordPress 2.3 — I’m not saying WP 2.7 is anything approaching Applesque design nirvana, but it’s undoubtedly an improvement.

I think these two things have to go hand-in-hand. There’s a temptation to sequester yourselves in an ivory Skype swarm tower and pelt the community with your edicts, from beyond earshot. You have to judge which things require a cohesive vision from the inner circle and which things should be left to the general community to decide.

American Yak said

Thanks for the more honest assessment, especially from one at the ramparts. I sometimes think the cry for “Open, open!” misses other opportunities, though I like teamwork, leadership has it’s place.

As a sidenote, I’ve been hearing a lot of hubbub lately about “Gov. 2.0,” and admitting that I don’t really understand it, the effort does seem to suffer from overt, narrow (those two words almost seem like oxymorons, don’t they) focus on open standards (is it a blue, power-to-the-people sensibility?). Not ready to argue yay or nay to the political implications (not understanding it enough), it’s still my observation that this effort might suffer from a one-community-does-all approach, where leadership might be more effective in some cases.

Mattt Thompson said

Well put. As someone who walks the line between coder and designer, this debate is all-too-familiar.

The issue gets harrier when you take a broader definition of “design”, to include the system architecture of software. Open-source software works, but it’s not always pretty—either in the UI or the underlying code base.

Collaboration is hard.

Although the code may all be open source, the vision and intention creating it is stuck in our heads. The more you can communicate (and agree upon) strong conventions from the start, the better off you’ll be. Perhaps all you can do is hope for the best.

Nollind Whachell said

This is going to sound somewhat weird but try to think of design as a natural process similar to conceiving a child and raising it to adulthood. The initial conception is between two people who through unity create this new child. In its initial stages of life, the child is cared for directly by it’s mother (i.e. tending & feeding the child) and indirectly by it’s father (i.e. working to provide food for his wife which in turn allows her to sustain the child). Later as the child grows, other family members start helping out with the child in it’s growth (i.e. grandmother babysitting). Later on, other societal systems help out as the child starts going to school (i.e. kindergarden, etc). After years of schooling and interaction with many people, the child becomes an adult and final is “let go” into the world to interact with everyone it meets on it’s own accord, yet at the same time is still supported by many people as well (i.e. employer, banks, grocers, etc).

Design takes a similar approach. Ask any professional web designer and they will often tell you it’s critical that the initial conversations of the birth of a design be kept to as small and as focused a group as possible. In effect, these people that the designer collaborates with should represent the heart and unity of the company or community. As the design is born and evolves over time with each iteration, more and more people are introduced to it and can help with it’s evolution. Nearing it’s beta stages, it can be opened internally to the company or community or possibly even to select groups of the external public. Finally when the design reaches it’s maturity and is completed, it is finally “let go” into the world to interact with everyone on it’s own accord, yet at the same time its sustainability is dependent upon many people (i.e. people within the company or community it was formed).

Last but not least though, it is important to realize that a design is never “done”. It is always something constantly evolving and changing, just as we as individuals are constantly evolving and changing based upon the interaction and feedback we receive from the world around us.

PS. BTW you might be interested in reading Permaculture, Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability, by David Holmgren. The design principles within it relate remarkably well to designing for the Web and the communities within it because permaculture relates to designing within ecosystems and the Web itself is a digital ecosystem.

oliver said

“Open source code, in contrast, can have many authors and be improved incrementally. Design — visual, interactive or conceptual — requires unity; piecemeal solutions feel disjointed, uncomfortable and obvious when end up in shipping product.”

Actually, code also requires unity. If many developers work on the same project, they have to adhere to the same overall goals and to the same coding standards; if this is not done, you can see it directly from the code.