Eriol Fox

Eriol has been working on human rights technology for over 10 years. When we think about how to design for privacy, security and known and unknown human rights, we start with a security and privacy focus to our human centred design, using methods and processes that think about what malicious people or governments could do with data, information and access to devices. Making sure all technology is safe for high risk people to use is critical to the future of private, secure and respectful design that doesn't rely on dark/deceptive design patterns and brings people into the full knowledge of what their software and hardware does. Eriol will talk about how they have worked with highly secure design research practices, how we design for journalists, human rights activists and civil society and how all designers can use methods to make their design more private, secure and resilient against malicious attacks.

In October 2023 Eriol while working at Superbloom.design published findings from 10-16 week diary studies reported by designers actively working on OSS contributions. The diary studies aim was to investigate some of the key questions relating to design in OSS and fill some of the larger systemic gaps of information from non-code contributors' experiences in OSS. There is existing research about designers in open source, but it has focused on analysis of data on issue trackers or interviews with designers. This session will cover an overview of the study, some of the key learnings and recommendations on how to improve and progress design in OSS. Project Repo: Diary-Studies-Designers-in-OSS

Open Source design has a plethora of hurdles to leap before it could become fully adopted by the global design community. Exploitative 'work for free' attitudes, workflows and how design functions/roles connect up through a product life cycle, how our software doesn't yet allow for robust and collaborative versioning across different designers and how the open source community as a whole, is over represented by those with privilege, access and ability. Eriol has been piloting a series of design workshops/hackathons, partnering with various OSS projects where together, we look to solve the challenges in how open source design can be contributed effectively and how designers can engage through OSS and OSS4SG (Open Source for Social Good inclusive of OSS Civic Tech) that makes a difference in the world. There are two versions of this workshop, one catered to designers wanting to contribute to OSS and one catered towards developers/OSS project maintainers to learn and grow design skills to contribute to their own projects and/or set up knowledge base for welcoming designers into their OSS projects. This workshop covers the best first issues to attract design contributions and the processes involved in building a design function of your OSS community. Project repo: The Design We Open.