A Q1 recap
Q1 is especially busy in the European Open Source Software calendar! We typically have two major events that occur. The first being FOSDEM In Brussels Belgium and the Second being FOSS backstage In Berlin Germany.
FOSDEM topics
The talk that focused on Penpot was the one from Andy who works on KDE. Which powers desktop environments. The focus of this talk was how to build out design systems in Penpot in a way that works within the Open Source Software Ecosystem
Andy speaks about how Penpot supported KDE’s design systems ideological focus and the design thinking and user centered design, moving away from historically development focused decision making on usability and design as well as automating the design system into code more successfully.
And of course, Pablo from Penpot was on the main stage advocating for design in front of a huge room of open source developers
Canonical Design + Documentation day
Canonical’s Design team and Documentation team held a design and documentation day, where we focused discussion on how to set design contributors up for success making contributions to an OSS project.
Here the primary findings were:
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We cannot assume that the average designer understands OSS’s history and how it typical gets created, maintained and developed
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All OSS projects have different needs, processes, tools and priorities and any documentation for designs to contribute would need to be specific to that project and therefore a general template can only do so much for open source design contributions generally.
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Designers often want and need a lot of onboarding into the general purpose, goals and objectives of a technology from a user point of view before they can tackle a discreet/isolated task. Most OSS projects describe isolated tasks like ‘Design a logo’ ‘Improve our UX for onboarding’ etc. and designers want and need more than those tasks to fully understand the smaller task.
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OSS projects tend to find it difficult to describe what they need from a designer and design, since folks making OSS tend to be coders who haven’t been trained in how to write a design brief.
FOSSBackstage topics + Barcamp discussion
Foss backstage is an OSS event that focuses on all the aspects of making good Open Source Software that isn’t about the code. From community building to documentation and of course, design.
Blender’s Dalai and Pablo spoke about how they utilise Penpot to prototype quickly in an iterative environment like Blender and how Penpot’s flexibility with tokens, components and other features allowed them to build both their high fidelity UI design system and a lower fidelity light theme for testing prototypes with their team.
Miguel Divo (Canonical) , Glòria Langreo (Github) , David Edler (Canonical) and Myself (Open Home Foundation) spoke on a panel about how designers can navigate engineering focused environments like OSS technology spaces. We offered some best practice advice like how to build capacity and advocacy in engineering teams and also what engineering processes can be leveraged to gain design success in OSS.
FOSS Backstage also included an informal discussion afternoon where the people in the room brought their interests to be discussed. The topics discussed were:
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Low telemetry research to design insights/improvements
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How to speak to ultra-nerdy developers
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Improving maintainer exp in the era of AI
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Design team of ‘one’
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Communal design decision making
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Designer Contributor guide + writing good first design issues
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What should people know about OSS and design when starting in OSS + Design
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Balancing the needs of power users and newer users
And on to Q2
Q2 included giving three lectures at universities, working at my design job in OSS and working alongside and supporting other designers in OSS.
I supported three other researchers doing masters in and around OSS topics. The first was about how design and developers collaborate and how user focused product decisions are facilitated. For me this was about bringing in the unique aspect that OSS has where your users are also often your contributors helping to build your OSS.
Another researcher was working on a more friendly interface for Github so that designers were not immediately put-off by the prioritisation of technical files and aspects in code forges/repositories. This is of course, something that Penpot currently strives for in making better code accessible and accurate from Penpot and making a design interface relevant and useful for a developer.
The last researcher was exploring inclusion and diversity in OSS. Designers historically have been under represented and utilised in OSS however, usability of OSS has become much more a topic of importance due to digital sovereignty conversations and moving away from big tech monopolies. Inclusion and diversity in OSS and beyond is still a struggle for designers where technical ‘competency’ is seen as the ‘gold standard’ and other skills are de-prioritised.
My own three lectures included taking a trip over to Amsterdam to visit the Students at the Interaction Design Masters program at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science. Here we gave an overview of what OSS is, how it’s often missed by people who don’t know about it and how OSS underpins the free and open internet. The students wanted to know how viable OSS was as a career path and a way to grow their skills and interests. OSS is often created and maintained as free software, but many people can make a living from making and maintaining OSS both as part of a company or organisation or as a supported freelancer or agency. Critically, the students wanted to know why contributing to OSS could benefit them but also how tangibly OSS contribution helped a better, more equitable and ‘free’ world.
My second lecture with students at University Arts London as part of the Creative Computing departments Computer Science undergrad course under the module ‘Global Perspectives in Computer Science’. Among many other topics such as designing good security protocols and usability privacy practices for software we spoke about how important it was for free and open software alternatives to exist as globally available tools to make making and designing software more geographically equitable. Not every person globally has access to the mean to have proprietary software and need OSS in order to practice in the global digital sphere.
My third lecture was at The University of Manchester as part of the Creative Industries and Innovation/CreaTech series
A quote from my presentation where i focused on Penpot and the one of the most recent hands on demo sessions
“Here from the video you can see Penpot advocating for better design informed prompting and stating that AI for UI design is only as good as you are at descriptive and relevant design language that you use to prompt it.
e.g. a non informed design prompt vs an informed design prompt
Don’t expect perfect results and if you want something that looks like everything else that is not solved by a generic aggregated answer from ‘design sets’ it likely won’t solve your problem.”
The audience here were interested in speaking more about platform monopolies and how possible it is to deconstruct these and also the normalization of ‘AI’ created visuals and aesthetics to have an image of ‘perfection’ challenging what design is supposed to do which is solve users problems in under specific contextual conditions and how aggregating AI visuals can interrupt that creative process.
Notably I participated in some other events where speaking about design, usability, OSS and of course, Penpot was important. Notably I enjoyed Imani Joy’s series of design ‘focus groups’ in Mastodon’s discovery week that looked at the open protocol that powers Mastodon and what features users and server admins have as well as a visit to to a neo-cypherpunk event in Berlin to see how the cryptography and decentralisation space is operating and what tools they consider critical for a privacy focused internet. Here the topic of self-hosting came up again and again as important not just for the code, but of course for creativity and design.
Things we learned
- Penpot is a critical component of digital sovereignty but also for freedom of choice
Areas to improve
- As expected, some OSS folks don’t find it hard to transition to Penpot and make powerful use of Penpot’s features where as some folks, like students entering the industry find the choice between ‘Industry standard’ and free and open challenging
Notes for future viewers
- Building out the capacity for use cases is critical. How people are using Penpot not only as a tool to achieve design goals and aims for projects, but how use of Penpot opens up discussions about self-hosting, privacy, security and sovereignty is a topic that has little focus and could be focused on going into Q3’s open contributions topic.
Photos, videos, links
