What If We Work Together? Fostering Reflections on Designer Inclusion in Open Source Software Through Speculative Design
For the OSS community, this work addresses the persistent issue of designer exclusion by demonstrating how speculative design can stimulate critical reflection and yield recommendations for a more inclusive culture.
The authors used speculative design to create two fictional societies (Husia and Reetar) to provoke critical reflection among 12 OSS practitioners (7 designers, 5 developers) on designer inclusion in OSS. The study found that this approach stimulated rich reflections on OSS values, root causes of challenges, and proposed actions for fostering a more inclusive environment.
Open source software (OSS) often prioritizes technical functionality over usability and UX design. This imbalance limits OSS adoption among broader, non-technical users. Key underlying factors contributing to this issue are the shortage of design expertise in OSS and a dominant developer-centric mindset. To address these persistent issues, we explore the potential of speculative design as a catalyst for transforming the OSS community's mindset towards a more designer-inclusive environment. Our design was informed by an analysis of online forums, which revealed designers' motivations and challenges when contributing to OSS. Guided by these insights, we created two speculative societies, Husia (collectivist) and Reetar (individualist), in which designers are valued for different reasons and their work incorporated in different ways. Through a user study with 12 OSS practitioners (seven designers and five developers), we found that our speculative societies provoked participants' rich and critical reflections on OSS values, the root causes of challenges, and proposed actions. Our work provides insights into how speculative design can be used in the practical, sociotechnical context of OSS to stimulate critical reflection, improve awareness, and yield recommendations for fostering an equitable, sustainable, and inclusive OSS environment.