Open Design Aphorisms
Adaptations of Raymond's Aphorisms on Effective Open-Source Development
These aphorisms were derived from a larger set of aphorisms compiled by Eric Raymond in his paper title "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" [1]. In this paper, Raymond hypothesizes that the Open Source approach to software development is successful because it capitalizes upon certain "truths". Several of his aphorisms are more generally applicable and especially applicable in Open Design. Therefore, the following list was compiled to provide an inspirational guiding-hand to Open Designers.
1) Every good design starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
2) Good designers know what to design. Great designers know what to redesign.
3) Plan to throw away one design. You will, anyway.
4) If you have the right attitude, interesting design opportunities will find you.
5) When you lose interest in a design, your last duty to the design is to hand it off to a competent
successor.
6) Treating users as co-designers is the least-hassle route to design improvement.
7) Release designs early. Release modified designs often. And listen to the customers.
8) Given a large-enough beta-tester and co-designer base, almost every deficiency in a design will be discovered quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone.
9) If you treat co-designers as if they are most-valuable resources, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
10) The next best thing to having good concepts is recognizing good concepts from your co-designers and users. Sometimes the latter is better.
11) Often, the most striking and innovative designs come from realizing that you were solving the wrong problem.
12) Perfection is achieved when there is nothing more to take away, not when there is nothing more to add.
13) Any design should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great design lends itself to uses you never suspected.
14) To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that interests you.
15) Provided that a design coordinator has a sufficient medium for sharing designs (like the internet) and can lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

References

[1] Raymond, Eric S. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". Presented at Linux Kongress '97. The paper is available on-line at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. The paper is also included in a larger work: The Cathedral & the Bazaar, Musings on LINUX and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. O'Reilly and Associates. Copyright 1999.

Last Updated: 01/06/2002