A Conversation Around Open Source, Sustainability, Aesthetics, + Design

 19th July 2021 at 2:00pm
Word Count: 3733

Two friends discussing how designers might better use open source tools and participate in open source communities amongst other things. Things quickly overlap with sustainability and general visual ideas … This exchange happened over email between 2015–04–09 and 2015–05–27. The actual email that started the whole thread is missing (or maybe it was actually an in person conversation and this was a response to it …), this picks up right afterward. It has been edited for grammar, spelling, and some tangential content has been removed. Most of it is basically the direct exchange… Additional thoughts have in a few instances been added to help flesh out the ideas more fully, mostly as footnotes.

- Kristian Bjørnard (KB) / Karen Shea (KS)

  • KB:
    • Your comment about how terrible GIMP looks (and many other open-source-y tools) bothers me. Why don’t designers participate in open source communities the same way that developers do? presumably the design of the tools can be open just like the programming. Is there just not an easy way for designers to get involved? is everything too technical, even in terms of designing how something should look? or is it that no designers really participate already, and everything is so hard on the the eyes that the few designers who try the tools just turn away in fear or disgust? How do we get designers making design-magic for these open source tools? (And designing in accordance w/ the ideals/values of the community; but that is a different conversation.)
  • KS:
    • It’s funny because just this week I offered to help make some icons as part of our coming mobile GL launch and I decided to give Inkscape a real try. It was really frustrating to use initially but once I got sort of used to the key bindings and interface I found it to be a powerful program that is really useful for creating web graphics.
    • I asked around a little about designers contributions to open source projects and it seems like when design without code is contributed it never gets implemented. I would chalk this up to the incumbent attitude in open source development communities that talk is cheap — you need action. There is a general “jfdi” policy. If a developer is going to spend the time to contribute his code to an open project it’ll certainly be his idea, not some fancy designer’s. This is predictable though because if no one is paying you to do it, thinking about UI design is either a luxury or an annoyance that in my experience developers don’t think about in the same way. To me this exposes the incongruous expectations between designers and developers. Designers are expected to learn to code but developers aren’t expected to have cultivate an eye for design, even though it can take just as long for someone to learn to design well as it does for someone to learn to code proficiently.
    • It’s frustrating but who knows maybe it’ll change soon now that everyone understands in this new tech bubble just how important design is.
  • KB:
    • I think it will change. Especially since so many designers are more connected to the coding side of thing, or at least have different kinds of relationships with developers.
    • I’m planning on giving some of these things a try. I’m interested in abandoning Apple and Adobe, but it will involve some serious exploration of the landscape out there, as well as building my own new tools and workflows to accommodate software the mainstream design world isn’t using.
    • I will have to say it is depressing to see screen shots of these tools as they look like they’re from 1999 still. It’s like you must have at least seen software made in the last 3 years, or you use websites right, you can’t not know that things can look different if you just try a little. Maybe my expectations are skewed? Or biased to a consumerist, capitalist version of things.
  • KS:
  • KB:
    • Wow. That is true that there is a certain sort of vernacular feeling that you get looking at that whole page in total.
    • They’re “bad” from a certain aesthetic point of view. But, one thing they have going for them is an absence of aesthetic self-consciousness. This seems valuable, so while they perhaps aren’t the level of formal goodness designers would want to see or create, they at least seem honest and authentic and “true.”
    • An interesting question to ask is what style/aesthetic properly embodies values of sharing, open-ness, collaboration, etc. — ask the Ehrenfeldian question, “what do you want to sustain?”¹ — and then ask, how does what this looks like embody the right feelings? how does the look and feel of this icon/logo embody the values we want to exude rather than merely look “good”? I think there is something that can maintain the authentic, honest, just-do-it, attitudes of these, and still be more formally successful …
    • Oh! Also, I met this guy last week who was at MICA doing a workshop about open source font design. He is part of a publishing collective in Belgium that only uses open source tools, and tries to make it so anything they figure out anyone can use to do their own things. Here’s his collective: [http://osp.kitchen/](http://osp.kitchen/)²
  • KS:
    • Wow this OSP project is so cool. I’m really bummed that I missed a workshop! Their Univers cut is soooo nice…
    • I think logos in the GNU listing really reflect one kind of sustainable design to me, that is, where the concept/spirit of the project is absolutely held to a higher regard than aestheticism (it probably helps that apart from main pages and these logos there isn’t a visual aspect to the programs). I think there’s always going to be something inherently superficial about aesthetics and visuals. Any time how something looks is more important than what it does/is/stands for, I think it’s bound to have some unproductive considerations, as far as sustainability goes.
    • This now makes me think that a lot of “sustainable design” (e.g. packaging for allegedly green products) is kind of a compromise: like is “sustainable packaging” an oxymoron in most cases? Of course the exceptions are for things that need to be packaged in some way for hygienic or expiration reasons.
    • You probably have thoughts on that having taught a packaging design class.
  • KB:
    • Yeah, it was really interesting to get to talk to the OSP workshop leaders. (Loraine Furter and Eric Schrijver. Brief writeup of their MICA workshop from 2015: [http://schr.fr/collaborative-open-source-type-design](http://schr.fr/collaborative-open-source-type-design]()))
    • There might be something superficial about visuals to a certain extent — things often just are based on a style or trend — but there are certain things that while in a “style” still maintain a timeless quality to them. For instance, the Parthenon is of the roman, classical style. However, visiting it inspires awe in you and you feel that the space is still “right” in most ways. The same goes for plenty of other times/era’s buildings, they maintain rightness even after the trend for a specific look has gone. Other buildings or objects in a particular style feel dated even if they use all the same tropes that the timeless things might have … (I think Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa’s book/exhibition [Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary](http://amzn.to/2ws5okW) deals with this idea nicely.)
    • To me there are a few directions a “sustainable” aesthetic can take.
    • 1. That the aesthetic is somehow timeless — a correctness is found that continues to properly exudes the feelings of sustainability and the values of the org, business, or thing into the future;
    • or,
    • 2. That the style is properly ephemeral for the use’s ephemerality (durability of style matches durability of material and object). This would allow that there are some styles that make sense, even trends that make sense, provided their aesthetic lifespan can match the use’s lifespan. So, a mailer is okay to have be super trendy or super of a style or time; an automobile, maybe not…
    • From the point of view of the open source projects one problem with their logos is that they don’t really adopt the same process that the software themselves do, right? Besides GNU’s mascot/logo most of the rest of those have not gone through a process of updating and refining. The code, the projects themselves, do have that happen — occasionally there are rewrites, one person fixes another person’s mistake, a feature is removed or added, things just generally improve and evolve. There are also rules for how code is written, multiple people then contribute based on a common system/style. Many other points of logic and information engineering are put into place. There might even be review or testing to make sure code is good and works. None of that happens on the logo or the design of most of their sites trying to document the projects … nor seemingly with much of the GUI when there is GUI.
    • I do like this idea that the concept/spirit of a project is held in higher regard than superficial design, but there must be some way to embed the values of a project into a visual that desires to be “good” visually? just like the programmers desire their code to be “good”? Now, one might argue that there are slightly more objective ways to judge good code — does it run, is it bug free, can another person understand it, does it break other parts of the program, etc. — but there aren’t always obviously objective ways to judge visuals in a similar fashion; especially by the non-visually-skilled.
    • re: packaging — I was constantly conflicted teaching that package design class. The main goals of packaging are to protect, inform, and sell — Protection to me being the most important. From a sustainability point of view, this one also is useful since idiotic contemporary packaging is often necessary to protect things from theft which are now easy to steal because they’re sold in a giant store where no one can easily pay attention to every place… anyway, maybe that’s not the most sustainable commerce system?
    • I would say that sustainable design specifically related to graphic design is basically just thought of as eco-friendly design generally. By changing the materials or the manufacturing process you make it “sustainable” by making is more eco-friendly. This isn’t really true sustainability. Packaging design is pretty much the worst offender of this, but basically because people have become focused often on the “sell” part of the goal of primary packaging. This is changing with places like amazon becoming the most common place a person might buy something. But still, the protect and inform pieces have become second fiddle to the selling … I don’t like that from a sustainability point of view. Do these open source projects “package” themselves more sustainably then? Are they more about the “inform” over the sell???
  • KS:
    • I just remembered this article I read a while ago that you might be interested in: [Why I’m Saying Goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft](https://medium.com/backchannel/why-i-m-saying-goodbye-to-apple-google-and-microsoft-78af12071bd)
    • I didn’t know Dan Gillmor’s name before this but it was still interesting. I would love to make all the same switches away from big tech, but it really does take a huge time commitment, at least initially.
    • I’m starting to think that visual design should follow that idea in sustainability “only use as much as you need, no more and no less”; and this idea is related to functionalism, which then makes evaluating “good” design easier. If you can clearly state why you need some aspect of “visual design” then explaining how something is good is just explaining how it achieves its purpose and how it is visually pleasing or … maybe not pleasing but at least appropriate? Sometimes elegance is appropriate, sometimes ugly is appropriate for the message. By that logic then, if branding is at its essence giving something visual distinction, then it intrinsically precludes trendiness because once something follows a trend then it’s less distinct and just generic.
    • It’s interesting to think about the ephemerality of the something to help define how “sustainable” the design is. Specifically in packaging I think that’s successfully addressed in things that degrade over time or containers that are meant to be Reused. Even if these solutions aren’t always the most visually elegant, they must be expressing a value that’s central to the spirit of the project/thing/group over flashiness, or, in packaging, the “selling” part of the goal. It becomes pretty obvious when making money is the most central part of a business.
    • I’ve noticed since moving away from design or visual anything at work that I’m not much of a visual person, and maybe never was to begin with. I have a little bit of style but actually not a very good eye for what makes things visually “beautiful.” I think this eye for beauty is a little ruined by my inability to see past the idea of something, and I’m starting to learn that there are people who are the opposite, and for whom if something isn’t beautiful they can’t accept it as “good.” This is too bad, and I wonder how we can change it.
  • KB:
    • That Gillmor piece really gets me thinking. Between that and the open source guys a couple weeks ago I’m gonna have to start looking into some alternative hardware, not just software, at least for experimentation.
    • > “only use as much as you need, no more and no less.”
    • That’s an interesting concept from a formal point of view. What is “what you need” in terms of visuals? What are the resources required for form making and then maintaining an identity or visual system?
    • I do think trying to more objectively discuss what “good” design means is useful, but it is really very hard. Technically weren’t modern architects were trying to make their buildings about engineering-like functionalism — but they got just as caught up in aesthetic ideals as anyone else — and worse, their aesthetics often were non-functional despite their “rationalism”???
    • Sustainable design obviously must avoid that sort of problem.
    • Perhaps something about “timelessness” is worth investigating. What makes the things that outlive their styles/trends have that longevity? So many things made in the same visual styles die, yet bits and pieces from every movement live on. What makes some danish modern chairs eternal while others, emulating the same style, can feel so dated? Why should one shade of orange go out of fashion while another is eternal?
    • To shift the conversation slightly, are there also ways to make the discussion of aesthetics moral like discussions of politics or legal issues? We talk about right and wrong in regards to the law — that is not really any more “concrete” than a discussion about what somethings looks like. However, we’ve created serious systems of thought and language to allow for proper argument and discussion on the topics … is the visual realm just behind in earning the right discussion tools? Or, rather, have we as a culture just not accepted the visual with as much seriousness as these other things? (the language definitely exists right? people into critical theory and some other aesthetics related branches of philosophy must have these conversations, just most regular people and developers and even regular designers don’t really talk about this …)
  • KS:
  • KB:
    • I am definitely familiar with Ram’s principles, but haven’t read them recently, so it is good to look at them again now alongside what we have been discussing. I need to reevaluate some of my design decisions moving forward. As little design as possible seems like a good mantra for sustainabilitists (and opensourceists?).
    • Timelessness is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Timelessness. Longevity. Durability. Resiliency. Adaptability. How does a piece of graphic design properly account for those things? How does the durability of a design match its ephemerality? How does the durability of a material match it’s intended lifespan? Why do things made of permanent materials get produced with the intention of only lasting a few months, days, or hours?
    • Software, products, and buildings typically fit this mindset better than graphics themselves. Maybe that’s why its such a confusing conversation. We know software will have a lifespan, hopefully a fairly long one, and we also know that we’ll be maintaining it over time — adding things, fixing things, changing things. Shouldn’t the formal aspects be considered as a part of this? they certainly are in good products and buildings.
    • I think I am going to assign some sort of open source design project to one of my classes … maybe the sustainability kids? or perhaps some senior level course, as sort of a real-life scenario sort of project … Any other leads on where I might find good listings of open source projects that might be looking for design help?
  • KS:
  • KB:
  • the end?

References:

  • [^1]: From Flourishing: A Frank Conversation About Sustainability by John Ehrenfeld and Andrew Hoffman (http://amzn.to/2wrMsTv). John Ehrenfeld tries to explain his vision of sustainability as first defining what it is you want to sustain, and then making your actions all fit that. So, here I’m thinking we decide what about open source we are trying to represent, and then try to aesthetically and formally support that; not just default to the visual solutions of main stream interfaces and software and products …
  • [^2]: Hmmmm. Is using open source designed stuff from designers capable of working this way (both designing AND building/iterating/improving tools to help designing) one way to get deeper into this? Are other open source designed things the only typefaces, graphics, etc. allowed in an open source tools UI, etc.???

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