learning

In 2024 we returned to COSCUP to hold another workshop focussed on designers making a contribution to an OSS project: “Designers in Tech-Open Source Design Workshop”.

A Tech Policy Design Playbook was developed and published as the culmination of our work with the World Wide Web Foundation and 3x3 on Deceptive Design, and includes guidance on how to run community co-design engagements around tech policy design. Superbloom, in partnership with Dr Carolina Are, facilitated three community sessions around the risks to “high risk” content creators and being de-platformed from essential social and content platforms.

In December 2022, Superbloom partnered with Internews and Okthanks to create resources that help open source software (OSS) teams better understand how design processes and user-centered activities improve usability, and therefore the security of open source tools. After publishing these resources and speaking about them to the wider OSS community, we found that designers and developers working in privacy and security OSS tool teams wanted to explore specific challenges through conversations with us. This led to the final component of the Adoptable project in the form of coaching.

How do you find out if the software you are building is usable and useful for others? We’ve written this blog post about how to address this challenge! It is often easiest to try out the software when it’s been fully built, but this is also when any mistakes are most difficult to fix because so much has already been coded. This is a concern and a challenge for product managers, developers and UX designers alike.