Designers and Developers, thinking about Design

The motivation from this BoF comes from the common conflict between designers deciding how a product should look and developers figuring out how to implement that design (of course, in FOSS projects the first part is often skipped entirely 🙁). I think part of this stems from the two sides having very different approaches to thinking about the problem—a designer may start with the look and feel of a project and how a user would think about it, while a developer begins from the other and and lets the underlying software layout determine what is finally presented to the user.

The idea of this BoF is to have a free-flowing discussion between designers and developers explaining how they approach a design problem, helping each other form a mental picture of how the other side approaches design.

(Example: I do a lot of web development in CSS which is a rules-based approach to responsive design, so I will explain my "design approach" such as it is and attempt to understand from designers what the parallels would be in the mental framework they work with)

Note to reviewers: this will only work if we have a decent number of designers attending, so please consider that when deciding whether to accept this BoF.

The discussion is going to be dependent on the people who attend, but hopefully this conversation will:

• Help developers form a better mental picture of how designers think and vice versa, so that their ideas can converge faster when collaborating

• Provide a foundation for developers to approach a design problem when a designer is not available (and know how and when to ask for one!)

• Let projects who do not yet have a designer understand how and where they can include design in their development cycle