It’s rare to hear of designers pursuing a career in open source. It is also intimidating to begin contributing to open-source projects. However, designers can shift OSS from being developer-friendly to a user-friendly environment; the community needs a little push. Designing couldn’t be measured in 0s and 1s, as success isn’t determined by whether a pull request was closed or merged.
My friend and I are working on the redundancies software designers face and how design can become a more open field. Our vision is to make open source accessible for more people than just those who can code. We want designers to help influence the world by being able to share their work and let people sample it.
We submitted a talk about the same for the OpenSUSE Asia Summit 2024 in Tokyo, Japan . Our talk has been selected, and we’re invited to attend the in-person conference. However, due to budget limits, they cannot fund our travel at this time.
Through the talk, we want to start conversations around how open source can reward contributions in design. UX design is a mutually collaborative process where everybody feels related to any idea or implementation. It is very hard for designers to get attribution for their work today.
This conference provides an international platform to discuss open-source design and gives visibility to the community. We want to attend the conference, but as fresh graduates out of college, we cannot financially support this endeavour.
I request the community to help fund our travel, if they can, so that we can experience this moment; we’d be truly grateful forever and, hopefully, fund upcoming designers at our turn!