unity-design team mailing list archive

[David Siegel <david.siegel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

See http://tinyurl.com/2ebzvww for an article on Mozilla's community-driven
design efforts. An interesting caveat from the article:

Some commentators doubt that an open source approach can be fruitfully
applied to design. "There are plenty of good ideas, but they don't work well
together with the real world," says Jakob Nielsen, principal at the Nielsen
Norman Group in Fremont, Calif. Open source encourages the addition of new
solutions and ideas. In design, says Nielsen, "the brilliant idea can be the
one unifying idea that can take away 10 other ideas."

Can anyone cite an example of a "unifying idea that can take away 10 other
ideas" from the Ayatana list, or are we generating "plenty of good ideas
[that] don't work well together"? What can we learn from Mozilla's efforts
in this arena?

Mozilla's communiy-design epicenter: http://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/

David