Seedling note A seedling is a fresh idea — planted recently, still finding its shape.
Designing in the open
Early notes on what it means to design transparently, for an open-source community.
March 10, 2026
When I was working on OpenSearch, we made a decision to design in the open — sharing research findings publicly, inviting community members into design reviews, and posting design proposals as GitHub issues before we’d made any decisions.
This is very different from how most product design happens.
What I’m still working out
I don’t have a complete framework for this yet. But here are the tensions I’m sitting with:
Speed vs. inclusion. Moving fast and designing in the open are in constant tension. Public design processes are slower. But they surface problems that private processes miss entirely.
Expertise vs. diversity of input. When you open a design decision to a community, you get a wide range of input — from highly technical users who understand edge cases deeply, to newer users who represent the experience of getting started. Balancing these voices is harder than it sounds.
Commitment vs. flexibility. Sharing a design publicly creates expectations. When you change direction, you have to explain why — which is actually a discipline that makes the design better.
I’ll keep developing this as I have more time with it.