The Challenge of Open Design

Open design is getting a bunch of people together, often without any face to face contact, and designing something that everyone in the World will love. This is hard to do with a closed design process, and even harder to do with an open design process. So why do it? I believe, as do many other people, that open design holds far more potential than closed design because of the larger talent pool that can take part in the process. The problem is that this is a young discipline, and there is still a lot we don't know about it. Because of it's immature status, open design often ends in failure, and many of the participants concede that it cannot work. But, open design can survive and thrive if we are persistent and continue to document the lessons of our failures as well as success. So, to kick off design within the Fireworks Project, I thought I would start by outlining a theory of how the open design process might work, using another blog post by Aza Raskin as a jumping off point. Aza is the lead on user experience with Mozilla Labs, among many many other things. One of the latest projects he is working on is Ubiquity, which used an open design process to create the latest logo. Aza was gracious enough to document the lessons they learned from the process, giving us a leg up to begin our own experimentation. With the Fireworks Project, we also have the perfect opportunity to try out open design with our own logo creation process. The objective is to create a great logo, but also to reach a state of design thinking through the process of design. This is my vision of the process: Focus What is the design objective and what are the constraints? Identifying what the project is not rather than what it is can be a helpful exercise at this point. A clear focus for the project will provide a visible rubric for judging our work as we move through the design process. Lead Designate a leader for the project that will facilitate discussion, incorporate feedback, and keep the iterations moving. A good leader will ask focused, concrete questions that get focused, concrete feedback. Iterate The design process will need to iterate many times to get a good result in the end. Each iteration is a three step process: 1. Expand the idea into as many corners of our creative minds as we can. Open design projects will be particularly good at that. 2. Revise and "sketch" out most of the ideas. Sketch is defined in this context as anything that acts as an aide to our thought processes, not necessarily the common pencil and paper. 3. Narrow the body of work with a structured critique process. This step relies heavily on the Focus part of the design. What are we trying to achieve, what are our constraints, and what are we not trying to do? We need to plan for many iterations and accept that the process will take some time. We cannot cut the process off prematurely because we become impatient. Communicate Effective communication is constant communication. Use every tool available. Blog about ideas, use Twitter, instant chat, and news groups. Wait Ideas need time to sink in, and inspiration never seems to strike whenever we snap our fingers. Leave the project behind, move on with life, and then get back to it with a fresh mind for the next iteration. I tried to sum this theory up with a diagram inspired by Sketching User Experiences. Concepts are fed into the process on the left, and emerge in a refined state on the right. Each vertical bar in the diagram represents an iteration of the design process. This diagram has 5 iterations, but there could be more or less, depending on what it takes to reach the desired outcome outlined in the Focus. Also, some iterations explore additional possibilities while others refine ideas toward the Focus. This is represented by the black lines that end in a point on the right. Follow along to see how well we do.