Designers speaking about success: Success via attracting more designers to the OSS

[Erioldoesdesign]

A subtle measurement of success and joy expressed by designers in the study was the ability to work with other designers. The same joy was expressed by designers when they worked with other role functions on design tasks in the OSS projects that they contributed to. One designer had an explicit goal of attracting more designers to the project through the way they distributed and built tasks. “The goal of the OSS community this year was to network and get more designers. We understood from past events that webinars, workshops, and Twitter spaces were the best ways to gain African contributors”.

When gathering collaborators in OSS for design tasks there is an awareness from designers already in OSS that most designers are newer and looking to gain certain types of experience with their contributions. “This is a challenge because most designers looking to contribute are new designers and are contributing to open source to gain experience”. We observed this can be tricky for designer contributors for two key reasons — time and a sense of responsibility. The amount of time designers have to spend working on OSS is often limited, as they can end up spending time on design-adjacent tasks. When the additional designers are new designers, they often end up managing the design work and providing good tasks to supply newer designers with experience. Many designers in the study expressed "wanting to do actual design work" so the responsibility that comes with onboarding new designers is high in terms of what they, as an established designer in the OSS project, feel they must do to provide a good experience.

Future hopes for a specific OSS project in this study, is that increasing designers working on OSS design tasks would “Reduce the pressure on me and the other active contributors”. We did not observe that increasing the number of designers working on OSS has an effect on the OSS during the sixteen week diary study period but we suspect the benefits extended beyond the sixteen week diary period. We would need to observe this beyond the sixteen weeks in this study to discover benefits and challenges.

Though more designers contributing to OSS means success, the specifics can be tricky: “Working with other designers (means it) can sometimes be hard to convey a consistent design style that you want to maintain”. When working with other designers doesn’t go smoothly, the subsequent "coordination and fixing of design" in order to retain consistency can be complicated labor and can unintentionally communicate an untrue lack of efficiency of design. When these complications arise, we can look towards the lack of support for design in OSS tooling and platforms as a hurdle.

The reality for most of the designers in OSS is that they are primarily working solo on design tasks. “Most of the time I ended up being the only one doing the designs as the rest of the team are mostly developers”. Most solo designers expressed great joy when able to collaborate with anyone and happily shared documents and diagrams that were collective efforts.

Aside from attracting other designers specifically to the OSS, on multiple occasions, one participant stated the need for product/project management and how they were consistently performing product management tasks. They described success in terms of getting a product manager to help by contributing “I need more organization for delegating what tasks need to be done -- i.e product manager!”.