On my half-time restricted budget, I’m not going to buy a lot of books. So I visited the main branch of the Somerville Public Library today and it gave me an idea for an open source movement.

The movement is called “Open Source Design”, and here’s how it works. Open Source Design sets out standards for design among public buildings and small businesses. It is free and can be adopted in part or whole.

It’s up to the city (or business) to deal with the specifics of implementation, but Open Source Design should be versatile enough to handle most situations.

It may provide:

• Guidelines for usability in public buildings. The guidelines should address common usability issues in libraries, schools, city and town halls, the parking office, the DMV, and so on. Ultimately, they provide clear, consistent, usable design across city government buildings, documents, and web sites. The challenge of this project is that it’s both technical and design-related. And cities have no money… which leads me to:
  
• Low- or no-cost solutions for usability: signage, informational sheets (sheets for rules, recycling guidelines, public contracts (think Creative Commons)
  
• An archive of successful building designs to draw from.
  

This is perhaps similar to the Chinese Restaurant Kit. That’s my name for the standardized kit of signs and menus used by many take-out Chinese restaurants. These restaurants are not part of the same chain, but they have purchased the same menu system, the same photograph of General Tso’s Chicken, and so on.

The double-edged sword here is that design and open source are in conflict. Design is best when overseen by one person (“the visionary”), in my opinion. Have we figured out how to facilitate the design process over the Internet? Most open source software demonstrates that we haven’t. If we can’t design open source interfaces as well as Apple, why bother having a branch of open source for “design”?

But there are a few open source projects that have good interfaces. I think you’d find that the interface, or the entire project, was primarily created by one or two people. Other projects with decent interfaces will either copy a commercially available option (eg. OpenOffice.org), or they have a well-defined standard to go by (eg. Mozilla— “to start, it should look and feel like IE”). I want to look into this in more detail: What other OSS projects have excellent interfaces, and why?

Of course, you could also do Open Source Design for profit, or as a public outreach branch of a profitable design firm.