Amy Hupe: “Down with Design Systems Dogma” — Clarity 2022

And this isn't a new issue, Gina actually called this out two years ago at Clarity 2020. And she asked us to think about our design systems simply as our design as a system, she asked us to focus less on deliverables and more on the practice of doing the work The current represents our unique context, our organization's needs, and the barriers and challenges that we face along the way. And in pursuit of that one specific vision, we often find ourselves swimming against the current. So when we focus on the current and the friction, and when we find ourselves making no progress, we conclude that, or it must be us or the context, or the people around us. Amy, a UK-based content design and design systems consultant, argues against design system dogma. She advocates for four principles: defining purpose before outputs (prioritizing value over generic promises of consistency, efficiency, and scale); designing for context over convention (adapting approaches to organizational needs and existing practices); recognizing existing systems (acknowledging pre-existing design practices as a starting point); and focusing on changing, not building, design systems (making incremental changes to existing systems rather than creating entirely new ones). The core message is to embrace context-specific approaches and iterative improvement, rather than adhering to rigid, idealized visions of design systems. Instead of asking contributors to approach us, we published our roadmap of components that we knew we needed to deliver in an order that made sense for us. We set up a weekly forum for contributors to provide input into the components and patterns that we were working on with each week, concentrating on a different component.13:29And we use the sessions to gather requirements and insights and examples and feedback on our early designs. We then took the outcomes of that session and used that to then guide the development of the component or pattern in question, before eventually publishing it And this approach allowed us to start establishing this culture of collaboration and contribution that we knew that we needed, without getting completely derailed by ad hoc submissions.13:59The sessions started to strengthen relationships between designers and developers in our organization, and to cross--pollinate knowledge between those disciplines. So, we created a practice that worked much better for us by abandoning convention, in favor of doing something that was right for our context. sdgsgsg So efficiency is only valuable if it helps us to move faster towards meaningful outcomes for the people using our products and services. Consistency is only valuable if we standardize things to a good level of quality.06:17So there's nothing good about consistently crap and scaling things is only valuable if there actually worth reproducing. So, it's really important that we take the time to look at where we are as an organization. and we ask ourselves, whether these things are actually going to deliver value for us, given where we are right? N This is a new