We've bounced around the idea of IxDA labs for a while now. In fact, some might argue that we've had one for the longest time-- people have always been welcome to show us a better way to do things, and we have ways of setting up sandboxed development environments, albeit very manually.
What got me excited over the weekend was Aza Raskin's point that there is a vast gulf of opportunity for Interaction Design in the open source world, and that we are welcome to the table in many ways. While OSS is indeed a code-based world, I think there are collaborative behaviors our tools need to pick up in order for us to effectively join the party: -) Our design deliverables are not well suited for source control systems. They can't "diff" our files and tell us clearly what changed, nor do a sexy "merge" like you can with text-based code. Sure, you can annotate a change when you check it back in to the main branch, anyone who works with source control knows those change annotations usually get BSed. It's useful to see *everything* that changed-- there's always some small change that wasn't made clear in the comment. -) To the point of modularization: In the same fashion that it takes effort to modularize code, so can we do the same with design docs. Set up common symbols and background layers so that a change in one place propagates across the design doc. Find a way for people to work on those symbols and layers without having to check out the whole freakin' file. Allow people to update, or "build" the latest snapshot so everyone is on the same page. Anyone know of a solution for this? Would Adobe Version Cue help here? Fireworks doesn't seem to be invited to that party, at least in CS3 ... - Nasir ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
