geOrchestra — UX & Product Design for Open Source Geospatial Infrastructure
Designing for public institutions — IGN, regional territories, open-source community — means every design decision passes two validation gates: the client who commissions it, and the community that must adopt it. This is what product design looks like under collective governance.
Project context
- Role
- Lead Product Designer — UX research, information architecture, UI design, Design System, accessibility audit (RGAA), community contribution management
- Timeline
- 2022 → ongoing · Long-term engagement across multiple institutional clients, through Camptocamp
- Tools
- Figma · Figma Variables · Component libraries · RGAA audit framework · Community contribution workflow
- Ecosystem
- geOrchestra (Spatial Data Infrastructure) · GeoNetwork (metadata catalog) · DataHub (public-facing data portal)
- Clients
- IGN (Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière) · Hauts-de-France · Grand Est · Ville de Lille
- Project type
- Open-source community contribution, commissioned by public institutions — every feature designed for a client is submitted to and validated by the geOrchestra open-source community before merge
The problem
Geospatial infrastructure tools have been designed, historically, for experts — GIS specialists, data engineers, cartographers. The data is there. The power is real. But for an institutional user who is not a geomatician — a policy officer at a regional council, a researcher at a public agency — the interface has historically been the problem.
geOrchestra is used by national institutes and dozens of regional territories across France and beyond. That scale means the same interface serves a data engineer publishing a new dataset and a communications officer searching for a basemap for a public report. Designing for both is not a compromise — it is the brief.
The harder problem was not the interface. It was the governance. Every design decision made for the IGN or for the Grand Est would eventually need to work for every other geOrchestra deployment on the planet. That constraint changes how you think about design — from solving a specific problem to writing a reusable rule.
Governance & constraints
Working on an open-source infrastructure used by public institutions adds layers of constraint that don't exist in standard product design. They are worth making explicit, because they change every decision.
- Accessibilité RGAA
- Institutional clients like the IGN operate under mandatory RGAA compliance — the French public sector accessibility standard. Accessibility here is not a post-hoc audit; it is a design constraint from the first wireframe.
- Community governance
- New features are proposed, reviewed, and voted on by the open-source community. A design that satisfies the client but cannot be generalized will not be merged. This creates productive tension: the community acts as a quality filter against feature bloat and one-off decisions.
- Versatility across deployments
- The same UI must accommodate different institutional identities — regional color palettes, logotypes, content priorities — without fracturing the underlying design system. The theming layer is a design constraint, not just a CSS variable.
- Technical audience + non-technical audience
- The DataHub is used simultaneously by GIS specialists managing metadata and institutional communicants searching for data to download. Both use cases are legitimate. Information architecture must serve both without patronizing either.
Design decisions
Three decisions defined the architecture of this work. Each started as a client-specific brief and ended as a community-adopted pattern.
The Design System as the actual deliverable
The brief from institutional clients was always a feature: "add mobile navigation," "redesign the ingestion form," "improve search results." The actual deliverable was never the feature — it was the component that made that feature replicable by anyone in the community. Building with Figma Variables and a documented token system meant that every client project left behind an artifact the community could use without the original designer.
Redesigning the ingestion tool: hiding server complexity
Data ingestion in geospatial infrastructure is technically complex: metadata schemas, coordinate systems, publication workflows. The existing tool exposed that complexity directly. The redesign moved from a form that mirrored the server model to a workflow that mirrored the user's mental model — what do I have, what do I want to publish, who can see it. Progressive disclosure handled the technical depth for users who needed it; the primary flow no longer required it.
Responsive as infrastructure, not cosmetic adaptation
Mobile responsiveness in data catalog tools is often treated as a secondary surface — smaller screens get a collapsed version of the desktop. The DataHub redesign treated mobile as a first-class access mode for institutional users in the field: territory managers, urban planners, researchers who need to query the catalog without being at a desk. That decision changed the information hierarchy, not just the layout breakpoints.
From client brief to community asset
Each project in this engagement followed the same arc. A public institution — IGN, Hauts-de-France, Grand Est — commissions a specific improvement. The brief is concrete: this feature, for this user, by this date. The design work is standard: research, wireframes, iterations, handoff.
What is not standard is what happens next. The work is proposed to the geOrchestra community as a contribution — not as a finished decision, but as a proposal open to review, modification, and rejection. That process changes how you design from the start. A solution designed only for the IGN's specific context is unlikely to pass community review. A solution designed as a pattern — flexible enough to work across deployment contexts — will.
Over time, this has produced a compound effect: improvements funded by one institution benefit every geOrchestra deployment globally. The Design System built through the IGN project is now used by regional territories that had no involvement in its commissioning. This is what "designing for the commons" means in practice.
Outcome & reflections
The DataHub is now in production for institutions including the IGN and several French regional territories. The Design System established through this work has reduced the contribution barrier for new developers and designers entering the geOrchestra ecosystem — which was not the original brief, but became its most durable output.
What this project clarified: in open-source infrastructure design, the user is never just the person in front of the screen. It is also the next designer who will use your component, the community maintainer who will review your contribution, and the institution that will deploy your work in a context you cannot anticipate. Designing for that full chain requires a different kind of abstraction than most product design work — and a different definition of "done."
