Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Titre : Open Source Design
When this whole Community Design thing started out a few months ago, one of the things that bothered me personally was how to convey a unified design goal? A design language that would be obviously apparent in all the design work? Something everyone could understand and take to?
One of the classic methods is to write a very extensive design document but doing that in the start of what was meant as an open process felt unfair, and being, as I am, a person who sincerely believes that if failure is a risk, you should make certain that that failure is a spectacular one, I felt ignoring it would if anything help me attain a majestic catastrophe.
We had to risk it. We had to leave that out until a bit into the process which, as anyone who has ever worked on a joint design project knows, is what designer nightmares are made of.
Now at this point, eleven weeks in, Andrew Lake, a very talented designer and developer, has winkled out the nugget of design goal from the hundred or so threads, email conversations and chats, and tried to design a design spec-sheet to refer back to. But at the start this simply wasn't there.
To further complicate issues - we had to talk about “Vision”. “Visions” tend to be loose, filled with self-obsessive dribble, and (in the corporate world) complete lies about what the company stands for.
But they are, if there were to be any form of visual goal, necessary. As such, the first project I took upon myself was to figure out some kind of vision. Something that was loose, yet still concrete enough to work as a foundation for the future design goals without being constrictive for the creative process ahead of us.
The main question to be answered was: what are, if any, the design selling-points of KDE and Plasma? Now this is one of those areas I prefer not to talk about because it is inherently unfair to developers and designers. It demands that you look, not at what it actually is - a fully fledged, well made and rather clever piece of design - but what people think it is. “Bloated”, “Techy”, “Not very well designed” and “Dev centric” where some of the things I got while sitting with a notepad going through blog comments and posts on forums.
So I simply took the “techy” bit and thought about what kind of vision could be made from that? What where the positive bits of the word “techy”? The sensation you could get from it?
Being the massive nerd that I am, I thought “scifi” obviously. But not just bland futuristic laser-gun scifi - but a positive, human kind of scifi. Clean without being sterile. Bright without being blinding. Hopeful.
The science fiction of the 1960's. When adventure and technology were leading us to a brighter better tomorrow. When tech wasn't a threat and I remembered a quote from the book, Invisible Monsters by Chuck Paluhniuk, when the protagonists (or antagonists depending on how you see it) climb to the top of the Space Needle, one of the remnants of the Seattle World Faire's “Tomorrow Land,” and threw postcards off the top. Postcards from the future to the present. One of them writes “When did the future stop being a promise and become a threat”.
That was it! Something that focuses solely on the tech but also on the human 1960's scifi. A vision of the future but as if it had been written by people in the 1960's.
It seemed to catch on - but what was more interesting was what happened next. People added things, riffed off it and did other things. They were playing, bending and toying with the vision. Making it their own.
Now, I will have to restate the vision. But hopefully still bending it, flexing it, trying its limits and then making it their own.