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Birds of Feather(BoF) Intermediate CC BY-SA 4.0

Designers and Developers, thinking about Design

Approved
Session Description

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.

Key Takeaways

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

References

Session Categories

Other
Community
Talk License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Speakers

Badri Sunderarajan
Independent Tech Consultant

Writer, illustrator, freelance software developer, and Free Software advocate. Been managing DNS records since age 12, and now runs the family YunoHost instance.

Founding editor of Snipette magazine and currently Bursary Team Lead at Prav. Member of the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) and creator of Convo, an XMPP messaging app for KaiOS.

Carries a flip phone.

https://fosstodon.org/@badrihippo
Badri Sunderarajan

Reviews

Check with speaker why it wouldn't work when there is less design professionals. Even if there is less number of designers I think this BoF can help convey the design perspective.

Reviewer #1 Approved

A valuable conversation to have at the conference, and hopefully there will be a sufficient number of diverse voices

Reviewer #2 Approved