Open Study: A Call for Help

Design Open started as a series of discussions, or maybe a single discussion when different people at different times. I spent time talking to designers and developers at conferences and it usually started with the question: “why aren’t more designers doing open source?” Eventually, this would lead to other questions like: “what does open source design look like?”, “do designers need to learn to code or git to participate?”, “does it have to be open source or just open design?”, and so forth.

These questions led to some article ideas and ultimately to the start of the Design Open project. However, these articles are based on anecdotal evidence and theories, which is fine to continue the conversation on the topic of open design, but they lack solid data.

A Call for Help

Recently we had some new contributors, (Paulina Durán, Alicja Salamon, and Jan Dittrich) join our project who want to tackle this issue of research. They have been setting up interviews with designers and developers to learn more about their opinions and workflows. Most of their participants have been in Europe and we’d like to get more diverse participants.

If you have 30 minutes to spare, please contact Paulina (@winterdamsel) on twitter to coordinate a Skype call. Previous open source experience is not a requirement, in fact, we are just looking for a general representation of the designer and developer communities.

We also invite you to share this invitation with people outside of our immediate area of influence, as it would help reduce friendship biasing.