Sustain Design & UX Podcast
Background and Objectives
I have been maintaining the Sustain Design & UX working group since 2019 when at the Sustain conference in Brussels a working group was formed to support design and designers in OSS and to help design be better understood and sustained in OSS broadly.
Maintaining included facilitating monthly community meetings, gathering and curating topics of conversation, managing unique OSS projects that come from the group e.g. Design Information Inventory and sourcing, inviting and interviewing guests on the Sustain Design & UX podcast.
Impact
The sustaining open source design podcast has impacted the wider OSS community and ecosystem in ways we never expected. Our initial desire to start the podcast was to ensure there was a place where the hosts could regularly meet and talk about pertinent design and OSS topics along side meeting established and prominent people in the design and OSS space.
We have become a widely listened podcast not just by designers interested in or working on OSS projects but also the non-design related roles in OSS. These folks have been able to learn and listen to the challenges that design and designers have in OSS and gain better understanding of those challenges. This has led to people and OSS project changing and adapting their ways of working to better incorporate and consider design as critical.
Outputs
- Over 50 40 mins to 1 hour long podcast episodes!
- Conference attendance to record special conference podcast episodes at: FOSSY, FOSS Backstage and Penpot Fest.
- A high listenership globally but especially in South America and particularly Brazil.
New skills
Through hosting the podcast I learned what it takes to make a guest feel welcome, how to structure conversations so they flow and focus on what a guest wants to say and how to balance and interogate critical topics with my fellow peers. I’ve also learned and developed my speaking, recording and presenting skills.
