It also really limits the ability of a lot of software. Design, including user interface design, is a communication medium— not even primarily aesthetics. I don

It also really limits the ability of a lot of software. Design, including user interface design, is a communication medium— not even primarily aesthetics. I don’t blame people for not seeing the depth and complexity in fields they’re not in, but as someone that’s worked professionally as a (back-end) developer even longer than i have as a designer, I’m still perplexed by dev culture’s open disdain for design fields. I’ve spent many thousands of hours of my life contributing to FOSS projects, but not as a designer, because most are weirdly hostile to it. The FOSS movement could have so much more impact on the world if we addressed the fact that inscrutable dev-created UIs are unusable to people without a working mental model of software development. The big user-facing FOSS projects like blender and Firefox are foundation or corporation backed with professional designers. I’m comfortable with layout not being engineering— the processes are quite different. What annoys me is that so many in engineering look down on it because of that.