Open Design

An amazing thing happened to this week. The open source movement welcomed designers into the fold. Mozilla Labs invited anyone with an idea, mockup or prototype to give their concept to the world for critique and iterative exploration.

Linux, WordPress and now Laconica are examples of products built through communal effort by eliminating the proprietary nature of the code. Freely distributed, these systems improve more and more rapidly over time on the strength of the tinkering of a community of developers. Those practicing user experience and design, however, typically aren’t invited to the party, unless they also program.

Mozilla introduces design to open source

On Monday, Mozilla Labs—one of the early adopters of open source philosophy—issued a challenge:

Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.

You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.

We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

In the lingo of Mozilla, concepts include simple idea statments, iterated mockups, or functional prototypes. Everything submitted to this project is released into the wild for further exploration by the community, redistributable under Creative Commons (ideas & mockups) or Mozilla Public License (prototypes).

The intended purpose is not to produce a commercial product but to facilitate inspiration, dialogue and collaboration. This is a project opportunity built for the IU School of Informatics.

Featured Concepts
To kick-start the communal design fun, Mozilla offered up three initial concepts by design consultancy Adaptive Path, Mozilla intern Wei Zhou, and the head of Mozilla UX Aza Raskin.

Aurora

Bookmarking and History Concept Video

Firefox Mobile Concept Video

At present, Mozilla doesn’t have a mechanism to collect new concepts, although there is a forum to announce and discuss ideas. They urge use of existing semantic systems, like Flickr or blogs, to publish ideas, concepts and prototypes under the tag mozconcept.

An opportunity for Informatics
If ever there were a project screaming for participation from Informatics students, this is it. The concept series is relevant to our program areas of human-computer interaction, cybersecurity, computer science, social informatics and complex systems. To establish a cross-program team or teams of current students, faculty and alumni might prove to be a great community building project and one that will serve our greater marketing purposes well.