What If We Work Together? Fostering Reflections on Designer Inclusion in Open Source Software Through Speculative Design

TL;DR

This paper investigates how speculative design can promote inclusivity and reflection on designer roles within open source software communities, aiming to address usability and diversity challenges.

Contribution

It introduces two speculative societies to provoke reflection among OSS practitioners and demonstrates how speculative design fosters critical thinking about inclusivity.

Findings

Speculative societies elicited rich reflections on OSS values and challenges.

Participants proposed actionable recommendations for fostering inclusivity.

The study shows speculative design's potential to influence sociotechnical perspectives in OSS.

Abstract

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.