Can “Design By Committee” Work? The Case for Open Source Design by Mushon Zer-Aviv :: October 14, 2009; 6:30 – 8:30 pm :: Parsons The New School for Design (Orientation Room), 2 W 13th St., New York, NY :: Live Stream.
“Design by committee,” “too many cooks in the kitchen,” and other epithets have been used to imply that the creative process breaks down when it involves too many people. At the same time, the software world has been completely revolutionized by open source, networked collaborative processes. It is only in graphic and interaction designs — two fields critical to software development — that the open source process has yet to overtake more conventional design methods. How does networked collaboration present challenges in the creative process? How can they be solved? Can they be solved at all? Or do designers just not work well together? Mushon will address these questions in light of his own creative work as well as research done in the Open Source Design class he teaches in Parsons’ AAS Program in Graphic Design.
I would love to see you on Wednesday, more details here
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6 Comments
I just got into a discussion (ok fight) with a friend about this very idea: take web design– typically, a designer does not collaborate (although a graphic designer+coder duo is exceptable) and this resistance to dividing the labor or breaking the particular design tasks into smaller bits leaves the field of design as one of the last job markets that can’t be fragmentized (to a group of volunteers, for instance– like wikipedia or something.) I pretty much told my friend that, thankfully for me, there are no scabs in web design because we haven’t been forced to recon with a decentralized threat to the way we produce what we produce… yet…
If I attend your talk, are you going to tell me that my job, like so many others, is on the line as labor becomes a non-issue?
Really enjoyed your talk last night, at first i was worried and thought it was gonna be all about complicated coding for designers, but you did an excellent job at keeping it understandable and exploring the basics behind open source software and not just the technicalities. The presentation was also very entertaining. See ya in class on Tuesday.
ONE,
H.
I wanted to ask if people are using ShiftSpace (how do I make that symbol?) for media activism, and if so, do you have some successful (both from a content and viewership/buzz perspective) examples to share? I didn’t ask at the talk because I thought my question was too far afield from the topic at hand.
@H-Man:
Thanks, glad you liked it.
@gorditamedia:
Yes, though not much since § is in very early stages of nailing the right socio/technical setup that would support more constructive discussion and valuable collaboration. (think sharing/discussion/collaboration/collective-action)
One exciting example was this shift. A nice use of § for subverting a Pro Prop-8 site. It got picked up by BoingBoing and got quite a lot of attention. I really like this one, but IMHO, this type of use still suffers from the limited type of impact that a subvertisement have. We are working hard to move up the participation ladder (as I briefly showed last night).
Oh, and § = alt+6 (on the Mac)
Also enjoyed the talk, and I’m glad that you kept it accessible because I don’t know anything about coding/design. I’d like to begin though, any advice on where to start? Are coding & design hand in hand – should I begin by learning javascript, for instance?
Well…
I would not start with JS, I would actually start from learning html/css. There are tons of tutorials online for that.
You need to understand the basic structure, and you need to install the Firebug Firefox extension so you can easily inspect the html/css/js on every page.
Some valuable resources:
http://getfirebug.com/ (learn from the web by inspecting it)
http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/ (good free code editor)
http://validator.w3.org/ (make sure your html is valid)
http://blueprintcss.org/ (easy and sexy css layout)
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ (great inspiration)
http://stackoverflow.com/ (get answers)
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+do+I+learn+html+and+css (all the rest)