 Okay, so good morning everyone. Thanks for making it so soon to the second day of the meeting. Angela, we'd like to go ahead with a question that's been picking our brains for a long time and we'd like to share our ideas around it with you, as we all love our own thoughts. So there's this term that's been making the rounds, which is open design. Maybe some of you have heard it or run into it at some point, maybe some of you. Fortunate? Or you would like to see it on the camera? Okay, thank you. But we've seen it like in so many contexts, some of them like true free software-based sharing enabled design principles and others, just putting stuff out there and calling it open. It turns out that then by jumbling possible definitions and using this loaded term that is open, we end up with an expression that has no fixed or stable meaning because it can mean so many things that it might as well mean nothing at all. So by describing this wide set of practices with little in common, it's not a useful term. And that's in case you're wondering, that's really the point of this term? It's really about how open design is really not by itself just like this a useful term at all. And beyond that, it might as well be harmful too, because as designers who are involved with free software and free culture principles, having a term that kind of floats around the way you do things, but then again it might mean the complete opposite, also brings the risk of characterizing our work as designers who work around free and open principles. So we start by stating that this term open design and using it indiscriminately is actually somewhat dangerous to the kind of work of advocacy and defense of free and open principles that we do here at LGI. And to give a little context, we will speak a bit about what we do and who we are, because even though there are many familiar faces, maybe some of you don't know us. So we have a background in design when we finished our studies in 2009. We shifted to free and free Libre and open source software. So we really changed from the things that we learned while we were studying to a different set of tools and a different way of doing things. We started our design studio Man Fattura Independent in 2010. And it was also in the same year that we started publishing the Libre Graphics magazine together with Ginger Coons. And this is a print publication that we felt was really something that was missing to show the work that was being done and that was a crossing between free Libre and open source software, free culture, art and design. And which was also a printed object to show that you can actually do all kinds of professional work using these kind of tools. So for us terminology is a real issue, something that's really important. And that's why we've been debating this question between ourselves and maybe with a few other people as well. And we wanted to put this forward. It's something that we're really not sure about yet. If you count the number of question marks in our summary description, I think we won. We have the biggest number of question marks because we really don't have an answer yet. And we think we need a word or a term to describe the kind of things that we do because it's indeed a different way of doing design. Where we experiment, we hack, we try different kinds of ways of doing things. And we actually like having meaningful conversations about the tools that we're using. This is actually supposed to be a slide of the source design manifesto. I'll actually read it out loud. The viewer is not aligned with the solution. Yeah, I'll just read it out. So this is the screenshot. It's a napkin note called the open source design manifesto. And I will give enough context. I'll just read it out. So it says, I will find opportunities to design in the open, share good and bad, find time for meaningful projects, openly participate in discussions, work with others by choice and improve my toolbox. So this was a manifesto that we found published on the website that's called open source. Open design foundation. So this is some kind of organization or collective that call themselves open design foundation. It was started by a designer, which is an employee at Adobe. And it has this manifesto where they talk about their principles and the kind of things that they believe in or think that open design means. And when we read this kind of manifesto, we think, again, we go back to the open design problem, that it's a very vague kind of goals that you have here. You can't really find a clear mention of tools or any connection to free software or licenses. So it's really puzzling for us how we could call this open design. But again, that's why we think it's a vague term. So for context, an issue that's pretty dear to us and might be for quite a few of you is where the term open actually comes from. So again, not just open design but open whatever is also right now kind of umbrella term for what can mean a lot of things. But terms haven't been so loosely defined for a long while. And the term open, when it comes to software, comes clearly from the open source term, which came about in 1997 as an alternative for free software that had been in use. It's not just a semantic division. I mean, it's a quite ideological one that's been drawing a lot of arguments and fire that we are going to try to avoid here but still try to make a couple of points about this. So open source is clearly the direction that has been opted to just describe the technical aspect of software or culture or what have you. The fact that the code is open. On the other hand, the notion of free software or free culture deals with the principle, the idea of the tool and the motivation behind it, which would be to make you free, the idea of freedom. And this kind of was problematic to a specific sector who wanted to push away from the more marked ideological undertones of the idea of freedom and software. So the term open source has been proposed with a lot of success, as we know right now. And usually we find that a lot and with the proposition, especially also in design, we found this on other fields. The idea that open source is good for business, which is also one of the main roots of the term open source, is also to make it palatable to companies and other entities who might not really enjoy the word freedom, but they might enjoy the software. And those are defended as good for business. In design we see this. You might have seen, we have seen a lot of references by designers traditional, designers to say the known project, like how cool it is to have so a lot of clipart and icons that we can use without paying for it. Or free fonts, which again, why should we pay? There is this great thing called open source where we don't have to pay. Of course, I feel agreed, this is kind of the saddest and least interesting perspective on freedom and openness, because it's not just about money, it's not also about ease of use, it's really about doing things together. It's being able, for instance, to do the fonts example. The notion that I am free to amplify the typeface, say, with my own language, which is not represented there, that is absolutely legal to do with the non-free fonts. And so there is quite a lot more than business propositions, which we think also have been made up the most of the open design discourse as well, leaving out the idea of the history of freedom in sharing and collectively improving everyone's... Then another term that we've been seeing around use as well is the term open source design. And for us, this one, in comparison to open design, is a lot more tangible. It's a lot more clear that it has a connection to open source in some way, because it's there in the name, and so you can connect it to the open source software definition. So we understand that something that you would call open source design means that you are providing the user with full freedoms, so you'll be able to open, study, modify, and distribute the work. And this means we kind of figure, if you use this term, that you are providing the source files, you're publishing them, and you are doing so using open formats so that anyone can open those files using a tool that's not proprietary. You're also using Libre Assets, so that same person can open the file and can use the fonts and the icons that you've put together and other things, because they're there and they have a license that allows them and you to do that. And you're also using open licenses, which are a keystone to allowing that kind of freedom for the user. Beyond that, moving towards a conclusion, there's a couple more issues around this open design and this growing interest by design and traditional design field for the open source free ecosystem. But then again, it also brings more terminological dilemmas that we would like to touch, even if we don't have answers for all of them. So one of them is there have been efforts to bring together designers and free and open source software projects. And one of them brings the name open source design. They're a really cool and vibrant collective who is extremely active in trying to solve the gap right now between traditional designers who are also looking for worthy causes to employ their talent in and also free software projects that might benefit from a designer's input. So it's a fantastic goal, but we then started picking with the idea of if you're a traditional designer and if you come to a project and you're working with them, but if you're working with proprietary tools, which is the case in many of the examples that we've seen, so designers who want to contribute like with graphic assets for open source projects, but they're still using Adobe tools. So again, all part to them and it's already good that designers are manifesting an interest, but is this a different kind of design so that it warrants a kind of term like open source design even though what's open source is actually your client and none of it relates to your own practice because it's pretty much the same as. So we're wondering if we are talking actually about design for open source and again it's a fantastic gateway drug still for designers who use proprietary software to be able to get involved in free software projects because they will be faced with the need to use an open license therefore figuring out what an open license is and that's already great. Also negotiating with developers because you cannot just, and that's something that you learn quickly, you cannot just come with your fantastic designer vision and the developers will bow to you and stop what they're doing and implement your beautiful vision, you know that does not happen and that's actually an issue right now and so as a designer you also get this need and hopefully the skill to negotiate and communicate and do this, try to make a successful transaction for everyone to win but still again like this talk about terminology which is why we are picking on this specific term so the last dilemma for us is, we've hinted at it, what about the tools? So if you're talking about open anywhere in your practice, what about the tools? Can we use proprietary software and still have a practice that we can call as open? This is an ongoing discussion, has been going on for years the forums of the open source design collective are also vibrant with this discussion and then again it's one that every single one of us will have an opinion about and we have ours and our proposition for this dilemma is it acceptable, is it fruitful to consider proprietary tools in an open source design scene and we're really not so sure because we find a deep contradiction in the notion that on the one hand you want free and open source software to succeed so we want to help these projects but at the same time you're not using this paradigm that you want to succeed and you want people to use the software but you're not using it yourself so on one hand there is the will for contribution on the other hand you're staying and by you I mean an abstract designer who will stick to proprietary software tools while practicing open design and if you're actually not using free software tools because they're not good for real work then on one hand you're doing a good job for the free software projects on the other hand you're being extremely counterproductive to the actual free software tools that you're not using and this is something that was showcased to us a few years ago when we noticed that Canonical, the company that builds the open source Linux distribution, their design department was actually based on computers and that really got us surprised and that's not the only case of open minded companies using closed source software, closed source design pipelines and workflows and this is somewhat concerning for us because if we were talking about anything else that would not be designed like integrating a proprietary component in your browser software or in your Linux distro that would be absolutely not acceptable or even if you open up that component it can only be built using a proprietary tool but that seems to be accepted in the realm of design so we find still that using free open source software is the most fundamental contribution that designers can make to the ecosystem more than designing icons and more than any other kind of practice is actually using those tools because that leads to being furious with those tools you know the feeling when you start using this one and that fury hopefully gets ported over to constructive anger that leads you to contact people to figure out the problems that you have figure out you're not alone and then you might end up here in this room which is really what we'd like to do to close so we don't really have an answer this is a question we think it's really important to think about what term or words we use to describe our practice we decided to propose this talk because we wanted to give our contribution to the discussion we wanted to put it out there and to know what you think about it I think we come to the conclusion that open design as a label is really not something we should use anymore but we also are not sure what would be the way to call it and because we are in the Libre Graphics meeting we think maybe Libre design would be a possibility and maybe another one would be Floss Design so Floss stands for Free Libre and open source software design but yeah, again, it's not an answer it's just something to think about so that's that, just anything that you take from this talk if there's anything just hopefully stop using the term open design let's look for something else thank you I'm in spectacularly well for time so Castel sets up we can't actually start the talk until 10.50 so if anyone has any burning comments for Alan Ricardo this could be your comment this is a written, we can repeat your question well, I think we would probably not be able to force people to use open source tools because that would give freedom on the other hand, it's not this important just that they use high quality design which are all then allowed in that sense because we use software with high performance many of us, all of us, use software with high performance but of course it's preferable that people use open source tools but I think I don't want people helping us with that hopefully trying to be fair so Andreas was asserting that it's probably not as desirable to try and force people to use the free software and open source tools but rather focus on the files actually being shareable and interchangeable no, we completely agree that there is a spectrum of contribution and we've tried to apply that I hope we didn't do a batch of it that you have this kind of spectrum that it's desirable to have people going through that and maybe they don't get to the end, that's for sure on the other hand, I think it's also useful that we don't settle for little and that we actually discuss for instance why would a designer not just pick up a free software tool right away at the same time, we were struggling a lot with this talk at which point are we talking about the world that needs fixing and then what we would like to be there and of course, as you said, we would all like to have people using free software and given the inherent difficulties and changing your tool of course it's really pretty much okay if people stick just to releasing stuff as open our point here, I think, is that we can still push forward and I think we can still be demanding and saying this is okay, but the next step is even better and again, it will make a lot more of a difference if you actually are in it, if you are in it, too much of a difference still have a few minutes and then we'll get to that just to continue the conversation there is it really that tools are not enough in open source or is it just that they are not well known? Because the last few years we've seen the ultimate most of the major projects, huge amount of development and what is not working, maybe that needs to be identified but actually assuming that, oh yeah, the designers are using this just because the preferred software is better because I'm not sure that's the case in a lot of places Maybe I'll just do the megaphone thing So the point here was maybe it's not we should talk about the open source tools not being as good as the others but maybe there's more to it in that why are people not getting into them in a more massive way Yes, and also why are we not identifying the barriers that are blocking those people from changing the tools I think that's a great point because when you are not changing your tools then you are somehow stating that there's some kind of issue with using different tools and maybe there's something missing and so that's exactly a very good way to go forward with this idea of transitioning to a different kind of tool so finding what's there stopping you from doing that and of course as you spoke about in your talk we also completely agree that it's a very present mind so it's what you learn in school it has to do with the kind of tools that you learn in school and that you are used to being the standard for the industry practice and we think that's the reason why it's so hard to get away from those tools and if you put them forward in an early stage then it becomes easier that you see those tools as tools that you can use for any kind of work and that the tools don't make you not being able to do something you want to do they're just exactly as the other ones you just have to do it differently maybe We have 30 seconds Thank you so much for the talk I think what you're talking about is really important I don't know whether it's a new comment but it seems to me that in the intersection of design and free software there are so many big problems some of them systemic like the one around education that I kind of have thinking that this issue of naming is a different destruction from those much bigger issues we should pay more attention to so I don't know if you have any comments around that So a really good point that maybe considering the many problems and dilemmas that we are facing in design and free software world maybe the naming issue might be distracting I think you really point out a very good issue because it's true like we had in the last slide for thanking people you stop seeing the forest through the trees once you start nitpicking on the terminology I think you're right and I really hope that we didn't pass this on as kind of the most pressing issue that we're facing we're completely with you that there's much more to it our point here was really I also have to claim some kind of practice on the ground so we need to bond what's wrong with naming open design and open source design in things where we think they're not being used correctly because that also makes our practice being less... I don't know Yeah no it kills the visibility in a way because it jubbles our practice into a much dry, awful, grey mass of things that we are not related to so that's another of the dangerous things