Origins of the research

[Erioldoesdesign]

In 2022, Vermont Complex Systems Center at The University of Vermont awarded Superbloom an OCEAN grant (Open-Source Ecosystems and Networks Research Awards program) to investigate and give designers (who are currently contributing to OSS) an opportunity to describe their experiences in a safe environment and through anonymous, privacy respecting means. We were able to award a sample of designers a stipend to record diary study information for contributing to OSS.

This short research project aimed to investigate some key questions related to design in OSS and fill some of the larger systemic "gaps" of information from non-code contributors' experiences in OSS. Due to the limitations of the study, all of these questions were answered from the designers own perspectives and therefore have their own personal bias.

• What are the experiences that designers contributing to OSS commonly have?

• What are the conditions that can set designers up for success within OSS projects, specifically regarding "contributions of design"?

• What conditions create a sense of inclusion, both at the project and community scales, for designers in OSS?

• What is a design contribution and how is human centered design understood within OSS communities?

• How do designers and OSS project developers/maintainers/communities describe "successful" design contributions?

• How do designers describe a "successful" relationship with OSS project developers/maintainers/communities around their OSS project?

OCEAN’s mission is to "study how open source communities come together to solve complex problems". The nature of human/user centered design is to solve problems using research and design methods that center the varied users of the tool they seek to solve problems for. However, little is known about how designers contribute to OSS projects pertaining to origins of contribution, reasons for contribution and contribution in relation to development work.

Design is sometimes done by developers and sometimes by those with design skills. It’s difficult to understand where these roles and boundaries lie and with whom, and what are optimal conditions for success.

Through our involvement in the open source design community, we have heard many stories from designers about the barriers to participating, the lack of tasks and projects to contribute to, and the clear ways to sustain contributions as a designer.

Key research has been done around "usability" and "users" (beyond how to "scratch their own itch" developer design and build their OSS) being listened to in a design capacity for OSS projects (Raza & Capretz 2012, Hedberg & Iivari 2009, Bødker et al. 2007) along with research into gatekeeping methods (Rajanen et al. 2015) that designers have experienced in OSS projects when they contributed design.

There are, however, very few accounts of designers' experiences in OSS in their own words that have been documented and compared.