Yesterday, I got to talk to two people, to get some feedback on my masters thesis. Ursula Lagger during the “Proseminar Master’s Thesis” class and Martin Kaltenbrunner during the “Final Crit” session. These discussions have changed, what I will/ want to du during the creation of my masters thesis.
For better understanding let me outline my thesis shortly. My thesis aims to explore and create a clear path for designers who want to contribute their skills to the world of open-source software. The initial plan was to research existing barriers and create a practical “workpiece” to demonstrate a viable contribution method. However, thanks to the input from my professors, the focus and form of that workpiece will change.
The first major insight came during my “Proseminar Master’s Thesis” class with Ursula Lagger. I was heavily focused on the parallels between open-source maintainers and my experience in social volunteering (in my scout group), looking at it through the lens of social science. She pointed out that while this comparison is interesting, it was pulling my thesis away from my actual field of study. How do people interact with the project and the code? How do they communicate and document their process? How do designers get involved? It was a sort of sobering clarification. I realised the core connection to interaction design was secondary and I will change my focus.
The second, and more disruptive, piece of feedback came from Martin Kaltenbrunner during my “Final Crit.” My plan was to create an open-source Figma plugin as a workpiece, to outline the whole process of the creation, maintenance and distribution of an Open Source project. He challenged this directly, arguing that building a plugin for a proprietary, closed-source tool like Figma is more of a simulation of open source rather than a genuine contribution to it. He made me question whether a project can be truly “open” if it’s fundamentally tied to a closed ecosystem.
I will probably move away from the Figma plugin idea. Instead, focus on contributing to an existing, truly open-source project. For example could address an UX issue I found in the Pi-hole project. This new approach feels more authentic and will serve as a much stronger, more “translatable” case study for the final outcome of my thesis: the guideline for other designers. This actually was a third, unifying piece of feedback from them. They suggested that the most valuable result would be a practical, reusable guideline for designers. The idea is to create a “manifesto” of sorts on how to get started and contribute to open source, something that goes beyond my personal project and can empower others.
The biggest shift in perspective probably came through Ursula Lagger, which revealed a blindspot in my own thinking. What are negative sides of Open Source Software? How could giving work away for free to be used by anyone change ones reputation? what impact could OS have on the day to day work of designers? In my next and final blog post, I plan to dive into this blindspot and investigate the other side of the open-source coin.
Ai was used to formulate this blogpost (Gemini + WisprFlow)
