Just saw over on the Mozilla Labs Blog that they’re launching an open call-for-participation for what they call their “Concept Series”:
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.
What I like about this call is its emphasis on prototyping and sketching/mockups as communication media, and as intermediate representations. These tools and artifacts fit the open-source development model well, and have been under-used by a community that until a couple of years ago was posting UI mockups using ASCII art in Bugzilla — though recent blog posts documenting design process from the Mozilla Labs and UI folks have been a welcome turn, and Aza Raskin’s blog is a constant source of inspiration.
The Concept Series kicks things off with three video prototypes (one from Adaptive Path), and provide a message forum for the community to jump in and start talking. This last part is what concerns me; what I believe strongly is that online tools have a strong effect on both quality and quantity of participation. Dell’s IdeaStorm, for example, is designed (both visually and conceptually) as a Digg-clone, and so encourages very Digg-like behaviors, which work for a popular links site, but less so for an ideation/brainstorming site.
If a community of thinkers, sketchers, prototypers, and (in one word) designers is to flourish around this Concept Series idea, a site geared towards providing feedback on ideas, running small user tests on prototypes, branching and merging mockups and prototypes, and otherwise letting the design process flourish would be welcome. Maybe that would be a strong early submission to this Series: how can we rethink design collaboration on the Web, given an open-source mentality and a topic as daunting (yet exciting) as “The future of the Web”?
Comments (1)
Hey Mike,
Great post (and thanks for the kind words). We are working on finding ways to give more structure to allowing participation in the ideation of concepts. Forums are not the final structure -- just a place we can iterate from. I'd love to invite you to help us brainstorm and perhaps build that right structure.
Shoot me an email, and lets talk.
Posted by Aza Raskin | August 5, 2008 5:03 PM
Posted on August 5, 2008 17:03