About us, with us: The fluid project’s inclusive design tools

Abstract

Since 2007, the Fluid Project has been developing an integrated set of inclusive design methods and software tools to support personalization, authoring, and software creation by users within the context of a participatory, open source community. In this paper, we position the Fluid Project’s inclusive design practice within the context of interaction, participatory, and universal design methods. We examine and contrast these approaches from the perspective of supporting user creativity throughout the process of designing and using software. The Fluid Project is an open source community of designers, developers, testers, users, and other diverse contributors who might not otherwise fit into the highly technical and exclusive culture of conventional open source software communities.