 And they're going to be telling us about a very important topic about terminology and words. When we say open, what do we mean? Leave a free software? All of this really important topic. So I'm going to hand over and say goodbye. Hi. Good morning. So this introduction made it look really serious. We'll try to make it a bit more simple. We hope Manufatura Independente is our design studio. We started 10 years ago. And since the beginning, we have been using free software. We use open licenses. And we've been thinking quite a lot about what it means to change the tools, change the methods of work. And that's why terminology means so much to us. We co-edited the Libre Graphics Magazine, which was a print publication about design and for designers using free software. And this background might give you an idea why we want to talk about open design and other terms related to our practice. So we found this need to address the issue of terminology and try to find good ways to explain what we are doing and why we are doing it. And so we need to kind of figure out one word or two words or three words, I don't know, that could easily explain this idea of engaging with different kind of tools. So the first issue we found is the word design. Design is a very nuanced word. It can mean a lot of things. You can be talking about product design, graphic design, interface design, web design, design for print. So there's a lot of different types of design. And this is where we come from, is our background. And it's already a problematic one. And because we are using different tools, we kind of look for terms that we can use to describe our work. And one of them is open. And it's one of the things that we see in publications and in articles, this idea of open design or designing in the open. And we try to see how we relate to this description of open design. And we decided to go to Wikipedia as a way to find definition of what could be open design. And from the Wikipedia page, you can see that they have a very concrete definition for open design, which is related to open hardware and systems. So it's a very straightforward and not so much related to what we are trying to do. And we kind of figure out that open is also a difficult word. It's a word that has no meaning anymore in a way because it's used in so many different contexts that you cannot really tell what people are talking about. For example, there's this designer that just started redesigning his blog and he uses the term designing in the open. And he's using it in a way that makes sense because he is writing about the process, but not so much in the way that we would relate to the word open. So it's a possible meaning of the word, but maybe not the one we would go for. And then another example, if you look at the Mozilla branding process, they use the word open design. So to take care of the redesign of their logo, they started this blog and they tried to come up with ways to open the design process. So it's about being transparent and inclusive. So yet another context where you can use the word open, but it doesn't relate to tools or to licenses. It's just about the process. And what they did was, so I think they started in 2016 and their first approach was to present several possibilities for the new redesign of their logo and have the community vote and give feedback on these logos. So this was a possibility to kind of change the design process and make it a bit more inclusive. And of course, it didn't work that well and they are trying different approaches now, but still there's no connection to the tools and we kind of feel that it's lacking a little bit. So another term that we find often as well is the term open source design. And we've been thinking about, OK, could this be a good way to describe what we're talking about? So last year we gave a talk at the Libra Graphics meeting where our idea was to come up with a term that could describe the design practice where you incorporate free software and different methods for collaboration where you use open formats. And we proposed to come up with this term and the people in the Libra Graphics meeting launched a poll with the three options that we spoke about in our talk, so Libra design, Floss design and open source design. And it was interesting for us to see that a lot of people that were in the conference wanted to speak with us about this issue and also people that weren't there but saw the toot wanted to give their opinion about this idea. So we kind of felt, OK, it's not only us that are looking for a way to address this issue and it's definitely something we need to talk about because there's not a simple way to put it. The terms have many nuances and we need to address that. And from this talk we kind of a bit gave up on trying to come up with a solution that fits everyone. But open source is a term that has a very big, it's a loaded term as the slide says because it has been put forward for political reasons and we don't want to talk a lot about it but if you want to read there's this really good article by Afghani Morozov and he explains why open source was put forward and what is the context in which the word appears and what it means. All links will share at the end for these references. So open source and again we decided to go online and search, OK, what can we find if we search for open source design? Because if we incorporate this term open source into the idea of design we think, OK, there must be a connection to tools and to ways of doing and one of the first results is the open design foundation which has their own manifesto which they call the open source design manifesto and this is just a first draft that they published but it doesn't mention anything about tools or ways of working. It kind of focus on the idea of trying to be more open but again, open is such a difficult term, what do they really mean by this and there's nothing about tools or licenses or any kind of connection to the world of software. And for us when you use the term open source design we think it definitely means that you are in some way involved with Libra and open source software either because you use the tools because you use openly available assets so we mean fonts that are under open licenses or images that are under also open licenses that you share your work under standard formats so you're not sharing the work with proprietary files that will make other collaborators maybe not able to open your files so that's really important and that whenever you can you share what you do with open licenses. Also as a footnote because one of the details that we found when we talk about open processes in design is collaboration and when we were preparing these slides we were talking a lot like but there's a lot of projects where we release everything but we don't collaborate, we're working by ourselves and people might pick it up so then we kind of came up with an idea that collaboration is not part of the necessarily of the open design process but allowing for collaboration is the basic premise which is why we use all these principles to actually allow people to collaborate without having to knock at your door as for authorization and so on so after talking about this confusion with terms and what are we talking about when we talk about open source design we come from the design world of things we fell in love with free culture and free software and now for the second part we have some considerations about the role of the designer in this process and how things work so bringing great design to open source software you might recognize this if you're part of the community it's actually the tagline of the open source design website and we'd like to start here to think together about what this actually means and what kind of perspectives are at play here and the first thing that jumps to us with this sentence is this idea that design and software, design and development are completely separate like are seen as layers that we want to bring together but that are fundamentally separate I'm very sure and we don't want to be snarky and saying that this has an agenda in the slogan but it serves as a good illustration to a problem that's present not just in open source design but in design in general and the fact that design is usually self-contained in its own container and we kind of struggle a little bit with this notion even though we might be guilty of this as well but we wanted to run through this idea design and the software, the tool ecosystem are really seen as separate layers that we want to bring together but they're still separate, you bring the design to the software and there are some notions and this is not a quote from anywhere actually but something that we heard in different words in several occasions which is the idea that we want to make the tool sexier and that's the designer role well sexy is also a loaded objective of course but this idea that tools need to become prettier they need to become more friendly and that's the designer's role to actually fulfill that mission at the same time for this goal we also find a few instances of applying the notion of what an interface should be based on what is a mainstream conception that you can find for instance in material design or in the latest design systems talk this idea of a very clear mission for any kind of interface it is a single one-way path towards user friendliness and interface disappearing which is we feel they need to remind just one perspective that doesn't need to be applied to everything specifically to free and open source software and what we miss with this approach of making everything and perfecting, making everything better is the notion of an artistic experimentation on interface and on what the tool can be for instance this is a visualization an actual interface for the Git repository of a Belgian design studio open source publishing where they publish their own they have been one of the first design studios to actually incorporate free and open source software and principles into their practice in a holistic way that is not just using the tools to make traditional design but really switching and creating new design processes based on free culture and free software and this is the new version and what we really enjoy about this is that it shows how we're used to GitHub and GitLab and GitT and now by looking at this we realize there are so many interface paradigms that are being used that we are not questioning at all and maybe it's a good thing to do as a designer to also question why we are trying to streamline things so much maybe making things complicated is also a possible answer and of course if you come from the design world this is no nonsense for you because we are not just operators of tools we are not just creators of graphical assets and we are not usability technicians we like to see it as we address problems we don't even want to affirm that we solve them because sometimes you don't and sometimes a good question is better than a mediocre answer so sometimes it's worth thinking maybe we don't want to solve the problems but rather place them in the spotlight which is kind of what we're doing here so I'm spoiling the end for you we won't have a specific answer for the terminology and for what open source design could be perhaps morphed to but we are really keen on talking about the design process and that's another thing that we would like to make the point since we've been working also with free software developers and also contributing to tools and there's this notion that if the designer doesn't come well there is no design and that's not true well there is design developers are making design choices on every well not every but most lines of code at the point where you place a button so more you're designing you're making a decision where it should go strong decisions on what your application will be like and this is important for us specifically for us to keep in mind all the time as designers is that it's not that we are bringing design to things it's just that we are bringing our own design perspective to something that already incorporates its own and this is visible for instance we like to quote the earlier versions of font forge this is a free software font editor which is hit from many sides every time we try to show this to students to colleagues like oh it's so ugly the interface and it helps to know the backstory I mean it's not just ugly because the developer doesn't care about design it's ugly because the developer is color blind so he really needed a high contrast interface and he designed the program around that specific design need right now the interface is more polished but this reluctance to deal with an ugly interface actually made it really hard for us to convince people that this was indeed the best font editor proprietary or not that there is around and even then after knowing about the story and after actually telling people this is why I mean this is not just because the developer is dumb this is why the program looks like this and this is laid out which is an amazing page layout tool like completely next generation in the sense that it has tools and and some gadgets that aren't present in any of them and if you're conservative and if you come here the first thing you say is that it's ugly and while we get where that criticism might come from it also comes from a very personal perspective by the author Tom Lechner who really knows what he wants from his program because he's designing this mostly for himself and for his own publications and then makes it available on the other hand yeah we recommend that you watch his talks about laid out which is the name of the software on previously graphics meetings and we're getting to the end here we talk a lot like designers talk a lot about how developers should integrate design thinking into their processes and that's probably why it's worth asking maybe it's also worth thinking that maybe us designers should humbly address and integrate the principles and the tools and free software and open source another vision of the two layers thing is the difference in magazines and in the press between free software publications and design and art publications like this is Emigre and this is i Magazine which you'll probably know if you come from the design world so one of the things that we tried a few for a few years was to actually make a magazine that would sit in between and would bridge these layers it was called Libraffix Magazine it ended a couple of years ago but we also last year we finished archiving and publishing all the articles so that you can navigate them in the browser before you could only do them in PDF and also it was really important to show that yeah it's possible to work around these principles just use free software to make a print publication and this archive this magazine was an attempt to address this tension that we are presenting to you today so it's about leaving our comfort zone we hear a lot about designers who want to contribute but I mean it's really tough to get out of Adobe tools and Photoshop and of course sometimes you use that in your day job and transition is a hard thing it took us more than a year to actually make the full switch ten years ago but it's really about getting out of the comfort zone as a design principle switching the tools and this is something that we're really keen on is considering switching to free software tools for your design process you start looking at the tools in a very different way then you start focusing on the process we noticed when we taught graphic design and I'll be closing was to that we weren't talking about Photoshop anymore students realized that they are not operating Photoshop they're doing bitmap images which they can do with GIMP as well and bugs, bugs are really nice because they actually make you understand the limitations of your own software and once you realize the proprietary software has exactly the same problems things become a lot more clear to us so to end we tried really an alternative to open source design for all the reasons that we showed we still don't have it and we don't have that's our sign but we think we really need to keep asking the questions and presenting a critique on that not to be critical but to not lose sight of why we started this and where we are going we should leverage this the open source design community was unthinkable like 10 years ago designers talking about free software and willing to do that this was not a thing at all and we should make the most out of that and this is kind of what the takeaway from what we were bringing here is really every gap between design and development needs to be found first and then addressed and hopefully erased so that this ecosystem can actually and finally work if you're interested in these issues there's going to be an amazing conference not just a dev room but a whole conference about Libra Graphics which is in Rennes, France in May the call for talks is open and we'll see you there for now, we're done and if you have any questions we'd be more than happy to hear them thank you