2026-03-17 –, Room Auditorium
How can designers navigate in engineering-focused environments? This panel explores approaches for integrating UX into developer workflows and showcasing how design contributions are valuable assets for greater impact in engineering circles.
Open source often thrives on engineering-driven processes, where feedback loops, tools, and contributions are tailored to developers. But where does design fit in? This panel brings designers and engineers together to discuss how UX practices can be embedded in engineering workflows, from using GitHub as a design collaboration tool to framing design contributions in ways developers can get value from.
Our panelists will share success stories and lessons from bridging design and engineering in open source. Their experiences as designers and engineers will bring different perspectives to uncover strategies and patterns for making design more visible and impactful in developer-focused environments. They will highlight what worked, what didn’t, and how their approaches evolved across projects and communities.
Attendees will take away ideas for embedding design into engineering-focused environments, and inspiration from projects where cross-disciplinary collaboration has led to better user experiences and stronger collaboration.
Interested in embedding design thinking into the engineering world? Join us!
Eriol has been working as a designer for 15+ years working in for-profits and then NGO’s and open-source software organisations, working on complex problems like sustainable food systems, peace-building and crisis response technology. They now work as a product designer at the Open Home Foundation working on Smart Home OSS technologies.
Eriol was studying a Comp Sci PhD looking at how designers participate in humanitarian and human rights focussed open-source software projects and is looking for a new home for this research.
They are also part of the core maintainer team at Open Source Design (http://opensourcedesign.net/) and the Sustain UX & Design working group (https://sustainoss.org/working-groups/design-and-ux/) and is a host for the podcast about open source and design (https://sosdesign.sustainoss.org/)
Eriol is a non-binary, queer person who uses they/them pronouns.
I'm a UX Designer at Canonical and an active contributor to our Open Design Initiative. Coming from a computing background and then to design at university, I'm always merging my creative/technical sides into an adaptable approach to solving the right user problems, curious to learn more, and placing people at the centre of any task.
