Veethika's Speaking Engagements
All Things Open 2022
Topic: It takes a community to design an experience
Watch here: Overview
For many of us, most things in life come pre-decided. People with no relevant context about our environment, our culture, or our socio-economic dynamics get assigned the power to make life altering decisions for us. This had been accepted as the status quo in the software industry since long, until Open Source demonstrated otherwise. The adoption of open principles in design practices has a proven potential to bring down majoritarian thought dominance on how users around the world interact with different products. The organisations, who have pioneered the practices of making design decisions, need to come to the forefront, inspire and educate others on how to build in the open with community participation.
In this talk, I want to give examples of practices I follow as a designer at an open organisation to boost community participation and dialogues in the design phase of product development and at the same time maintain the equity in influence. I will be sharing the learning I’ve had overtime and how I overcame the barriers by making small adjustments to my approach. We don’t have to take just big leaps to accomplish dreams for a fair, equitable and more tolerant world. Sometimes small steps as changes in processes work equally well.
Keynote at Evergreen ILS 2022
Topic: It takes a community to design an experience
Watch here: Announcement page
Workshop: Making design contributions to Open Source 2022
Moderated by: OwnPath
Watch here: Summary | Event
💜 How can designers contribute to open source projects?
Thrilled to announce that Veethika Mishra will be teaching the “Open Source for Designers” module for our Fellows, and will also be exploring this theme in a workshop this weekend! ✨
The series of 3 workshops is free and invite-only, with the first session on the 18th of September!Some myths Veethika will bust in this module:
❌ Open source is just for developers.
❌ Tools used in open source are too technical.
With over a decade’s experience in the design space, Veethika is currently a senior product designer at GitLab. She has spent a big part of her career shaping the experience for open source softwares. An advocate for the participation of designers in the open source movement, she wants to make technology accessible for everyone.
Speaker at RightsCon and Tech(k)now day 2021
Topic: Dark Defaults
Watch here: Tech(k)now Day YouTube | RightsCon GDrive
A workforce with diverse thoughts and perspectives is the key to creating a product that is captivating enough to catch the attention of the international audience. To put together one such workforce, talent from varied walks of life and geography have to be assembled and provided an environment where they can thrive and be themselves.
Product teams go extra mile to ensure their products are accessible. But the known purview of accessibility stays limited to colours, dimensions and keyboard access. However, even after ensure that these checkboxes are ticked, marginalised users still fail to relate with the content because the default are often set in the favour of the profile of an average user(in anthropometry called the 50th percentile).
When the content is optimised to please the masses, then despite putting configurations in place, if the default setting favour the non-marginalised a product cannot identify itself as inclusive or accessible.
Speaker at All Things Open 2020 - Online
Topic: Future of Developer Experience – Graphical visualization of logical relationships in application structure and configuration files
Abstract: As a common practice, developers could only look at all the components of their application together as a flat list. Besides the visual hierarchy, a list also flattens the contextual role and significant factor of the components in the overall application structure. Fragmented probing is the only practical way to understand the relationship between the two components. And due to the broken nature of the probe, the bigger picture is often thrown to the wind. This workflow further inflates the complexity of the already strenuous job of a developer.
Configuration files are widely used in application development. And still, handling the data serialization languages constitutes a very stressful part of a developer’s job. Sometimes a single space mismatch could get code to stop working, and sometimes you have to make a hard choice between complexity in code hierarchy and complexity in file management.
By representing the configuration files and application structure visually, a lot of pressure and distress could be taken away from a developer’s job, thereby fostering an innovation centered work environment for them.
Creative Commons Global Summit 2020 - Online
Topic: What is this exercise all about?
Git repository: https://gitlab.com/v_mishra/life-of-a-content/-/tree/master
Ever wonder what happens to your content once you release it under a creative commons license? The music, art, writings, videos and other artefacts that you put out into the world takes so many beautiful forms overtime when other creators add their own creativity on top of it by reusing or remixing them with more goodness. But this could be a very slow process and that makes it difficult for you to notice this metamorphosis in action. In this exercise, we would try to run the same process at an accelerated speed and in a controlled space so you get to witness this transition up close and live.
Participation in eLife Innovation Sprint 2020
Project: SciGen Report
Role: User Experience Expert
Project: Tweet your research suggestion
Role: User Experience Expert, brief consultation
Speaker at All Things Open – 2019 - Raleigh
Topic: Turn Up the Fun ––Gamifying Education
Abstract: Through games, students get to live the narrative as one of their own. The immersion helps the students to retain the knowledge for a much longer time compared to conventional methods. Using the power of basic game design methodologies, powered by CC licenses, educators could come up with activities that students would crave to be a part of. The session would touch upon the following points:
The session was a demonstration for innovative educators to empower them to make their artefacts reach a very wide audience, game designers could learn how to use CC licences and put up a better community for play-test, feedback and resource generation for their own games.
Project participation at eLife Innovation Sprint – 2019 - Cambridge UK
Project: Open Science Game
Role: Game Concept Designer
Summary: Participants from various walks of life(science researchers, developers, Ph.D. scholars, designers) were selected to be a part of an innovation sprint held at Cambridge,UK, hosted by eLife. I had also received a scholarship to participate and attend the event.
The objective of our project––Open Science game––was to prepare a new Ph.D. candidate to the various hurdles that they might face in the process of disseminating their findings and research works under open access.
Workshop 1: Creative Commons Global Summit 2019 - Lisbon
Topic: Usability testing for Open Design Toolkit
Abstract: Open Design toolkit – The design team for almost every product/service, at some point in time, struggles with getting the right audience for conducting their research and user-testing on. But the challenge doesn’t end there. It again boils downs to the willingness in participation shown by the selected bunch of recruited participants that determines the quality of the data & information, on which the companies bid their highest stakes for bettering their product. The process is expensive and requires a huge investment of time and resources as well, and yet the chances of getting hands on the right data stand very slim.
The Open Design Toolkit is a set of methodologies designed by putting together various learnings from within red hat while dealing with both upstream and downstream stakeholders/communities. The proposal talks about ways in which it could help a designer to make the best out of a community by suggesting certain immersion point in the design process and certain documentation standards that could make the collected data helpful for a wider audience and can help others leverage the outcome of activities conducted by another team(if the target audience and problem statements lie on the same plane). This could eventually lead to the formation of an open design network that acts as a support system for one another, and bringing diverse viewpoints to the table that one team alone can never achieve, or become a tool ready to be leveraged by various existing community of practices
Workshop 2 at Creative Commons Global Summit 2019 Lisbon
Topic: Gamifying Education
Summary: Educators interested in OER were given an opportunity to pick a subject of their choice and come-up with a gameplay for the same, making use of the methodology shared(link added). The methodology also included various check points to ensure the final game could be easily released under open license.
Speaker at Open Source Summit Europe – 2018 Edinburgh
Topic: Proposal for Open Design Toolkit
Abstract: Open Design toolkit – The design team for almost every product/service, at some point in time, struggles with getting the right audience for conducting their research and user-testing on. But the challenge doesn’t end there. It again boils downs to the willingness in participation shown by the selected bunch of recruited participants that determines the quality of the data & information, on which the companies bid their highest stakes for bettering their product. The process is expensive and requires a huge investment of time and resources as well, and yet the chances of getting hands on the right data stand very slim.
The Open Design Toolkit is a set of methodologies designed by putting together various learnings from within red hat while dealing with both upstream and downstream stakeholders/communities. The proposal talks about ways in which it could help a designer to make the best out of a community by suggesting certain immersion point in the design process and certain documentation standards that could make the collected data helpful for a wider audience and can help others leverage the outcome of activities conducted by another team(if the target audience and problem statements lie on the same plane). This could eventually lead to the formation of an open design network that acts as a support system for one another, and bringing diverse viewpoints to the table that one team alone can never achieve, or become a tool ready to be leveraged by various existing community of practices
Speaker at DevConf India 2018
Topic: For the users, by the users
Abstract: In case of open source products, the ‘usability’ gets defined by itself. While others struggle to find and interview genuine users of their products, there’s a huge pool of stakeholders we know as ‘community’, who are also the actual users of the tools/products, always available to share their valuable inputs and talk about their individual perspectives at their own will.
What a team of UX researchers and usability testers could probably miss addressing sitting in isolation in a glass room, can hardly go unseen when there’s a huge community involvement. All we need to do as experience designers are shift our focus, from crafting to listening, because everything is already being talked about.
Speaker at Creative Commons Global Summit 2018 – Toronto
Topic: For the users, by the users
Summary: The session resonates with the 2nd goal of the summit, which says “Leverage the power of the CC Network through inclusive and diverse participation: shared objectives, collaboration, and communication.” The talk revolves around how the practice of crafting the user experience changes drastically when a community is involved. What a team of UX researchers and usability testers could probably miss to address sitting in isolation in a glass room, can hardly go unseen by a community.
Speaker at OER 2016 – Edinburgh
Topic: GameEd Archive
Abstract: The “GameEd Archive” is a proposed initiative in ideation, that aims at solving the aforementioned problems. The existing game information resources have a vast user base and the same could be tapped to get the additional information required about the games leading to right categorization. If a student in some part of the world wishes to learn more about a topic, e.g. continental drift, with the help of right filters and keywords they could get access to all the free games about the desired topic and can engage in a playful interaction and conversation with their fellow students.
The best part is, existing resources like boardgamegeek.com could be used as a source for extracting these informations, without having to cultivate a community from scratch, that is willing and happy to share information about games. With the increase in the number of startups around the idea of ‘Learning through Play’, the viability of the cause vouches for itself. More and more parents and school organisations are making a move towards introducing ‘Play’ in education. But not every kid can afford the luxury to access such education system. Game-ed aims to bridge this gap and make the idea of ‘Learning through Play’ affordable for all.
However, the concept could be self-challenging in term of giving the kids the freedom to take moral decisions, that they might not be prepared for, and hence the absence of mentorship can be a possible challenge for the development of one’s conscience. These, and many other issues could be tackled if a right approach is adopted to implement the idea.
Speaker at Fuel Gilt 2015 – Chennai, India
Topic: Of Marios’ and Mushrooms – Localization in the gaming industry