Hey Andy, Andy Wingo wrote: > Hi Alan, > > FWIW I mostly like GNOME 3, so I don't want to pile on the flamefest. > But this bothered me: > > On Sun 06 Feb 2011 15:27, Allan Day <[email protected]> writes: > > > Even if you had records of every discussion, you wouldn't get the > > information you're looking for. Design decisions don't get made > > committee meeting style, and design involves a lot of specialist > > background knowledge which doesn't get explicitly referenced. Fact is, > > we'll probably never be able to give 100% of the rationale behind design > > decisions. > > The thing is, we've done mostly well in the programming department. If > the subtext is this is the case for design in contrast to programming, I > would like to disagree; that would be unjust both to programming and to > design. > > Often programming is just as solitary an affair, yet we manage to > communicate in such a way that enables collaboration; > surely > programmers are not more socially competent than designers ;-) > > Likewise designers don't work alone. I'm sure you have been one of two > or three or six designers sitting at a table hashing things out. In > neither profession do things happen "committee meeting style" -- when > things go well, of course! -- but there is collaboration.
Sure, designers communicate and collaborate. And of course we need to make an effort to ensure that our communications are accessible to others. > This characterization of design also neglects the great community design > work that has been done recently by Máirín, for example, and done to an > extent within GNOME. I'm not as familiar with Máirín's work as I should be. It's fair to say that experiments in community design have had mixed results, though: Papercuts is an obvious success, but the Ayatana list isn't a productive place and UX Advocates is dead. (I'm not sure how Mozilla's efforts have worked out...) > Finally, it's rare that a programmer never does design work, or for a > designer never to code at all. Totally agree: 'designer' and 'developer' aren't mutually exclusive categories. > We all need pointers and records to > figure out how things are done. Of course it's not always possible! That's what the HIG is for, though I do think we can do more to keep people abreast of new developments. > But it would be an error not to hold transparency up as a goal, IMO. The question, I think, is what role we imagine transparency to perform. If it's to inform and to make the community feel that it's a part of GNOME design, then I am all for it. What I'm skeptical about is the idea of transparency for the purposes of accountability. > > It simply isn't true to say that we haven't made an effort to explain > > what we're doing. I explained many of the design considerations in my > > blog post [1] on this subject, and I did that precisely because I wanted > > to help people to be informed. > > For this, and all your awesome work, thank you! Thanks. :) Allan -- Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/ IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
