BT’s design team brainstormed and conducted remote workshops to standardize on the terms they use to talk about user-centered design.

“Design APIs don’t seem like a stretch of the imagination. An API-driven approach is the natural extension of the work currently being done on design systems, including tokens and standardization projects.”

“Context is critical for teams using design systems. Without it, they either force fit user needs into components that don’t scale or surrender to the technical debt of making everything from scratch. Both of these approaches create more silos than collaboration, and exacerbate institutional amnesia.”

Sprout Social learned that one of the biggest barriers to contributions to their design system is understanding what the system needs. Contributors are much more likely to contribute if they feel like they are working towards a well-defined end goal as opposed to self-initiating a system change.

Why not reinvent HTML and CSS and reboot the web? Why not, indeed.

Inventories and maps of an organization’s digital ecosystem help identify macro-level problems and opportunities at the macro level.

Operating at the scale of IBM means the design system requires additional foundational technology to work across a diverse set of brands and lines of business.

“If designers don’t think about and practice design at the level of systems and put politics at the core of what they do—with climate crisis, fascism, racism, xenophobia—when we realise that we don’t have any other option, there will be no future at all.”

How Docusign’s system, Olive, evolved from a CSS style guide to a design system.