The power of design in OSS: building design culture across organisations and communities

Ubuntu Summit Ubuntu Summit 25.10
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The power of design in OSS
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Title

The power of design in OSS: building design culture across organisations and communities

Speaker(s)

Eriol Fox
Victory Brown

Date and time

2025-10-24T14:00:00Z

Session type

:speech_balloon: Talk (25 minutes)

Abstract

Design in OSS continues to be an unintentionally hidden aspect of how OSS is built. Design is often started and continued by the developers that found and maintain OSS tools until the rare opportunity when someone with experience and interest in design offers to take on design efforts in the OSS. This rare occurrence, either a lucky event for most OSS projects or a targeted investment for OSS projects that are able to allocate any of their funding budget to ‘design’.

Speaker(s) bio

Eriol Fox
Eriol has been working as a designer for 15+ years working in for-profits and then NGO’s and open-source software organisations, working on complex problems like sustainable food systems, peace-building and crisis response technology. Eriol now works at Superbloom design, research, open-source and technology projects.

Eriol was studying a Comp Sci PhD looking at how designers participate in humanitarian and human rights focussed open-source software projects and is looking for a new home for this research.

They are also part of the core teams at Open Source Design (http://opensourcedesign.net/) and Human Rights Centred Design working group (https://hrcd.pubpub.org/) and Sustain UX & Design working group (https://sustainoss.org/working-groups/design-and-ux/) and help hosts podcast about open source and design (https://sosdesign.sustainoss.org/)

Eriol is a non-binary, queer person who uses they/them pronouns.

Victory Brown
Victory Brown has been working in the tech space for nearly five years, focusing on design research, community building, and design advocacy. She is passionate about supporting open-source projects by helping new design contributors get started through writing, OS conference planning, workshops, and speaking engagements.

Victory now works at Superbloom, where she is part of a team of human-centered designers creating tools that focus on security and privacy, making the internet safer for people and communities. Alongside her work at Superbloom, she actively champions women in design and works to empower African communities to engage with open source, ensuring that diverse voices and regional perspectives are represented in global conversations about technology and design.

:question: Questions about this session? Please reply to this topic, top questions may be featured during the live event!

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  • if only the USB group had asked a designer for help, old USB type A flash drives are famous for requiring 3 attempts to plug in:smiley:

  • Victory told about a lot of design being not just visual, it reminded me of a lovely podcast called ‘99% invisible’ which explains how great design can be so much more than what is just noticed.
    e.g. all of us have sometime in the past pushed a pull door and vice versa.
    Why not change the design so ‘push’ side of door has a flat surface to encourage pushing, and have a handle on the ‘pull’ side of door.

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Thank you for the comments :smiley: I’m glad you found Victory’s experiences insightful, she’s a fantastic community advocate for OSS design and we both would love more ‘push/pull’ in OSS with Design

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