When you start a redesign process for a company, it’s very easy to briefly look at all their products (apps, websites, newsletters, etc) and first of all make fun of how bad it all looks, and then design this one single design system for everything. However, once you start diving into why those decisions were made, they often reveal local knowledge that your design system doesn’t solve.
In this talk transcript, Rune Madsen enumerates the reasons for his informed scepticism towards design systems:
- The first concern, which is also the main argument of this talk, is that humans – especially designers and engineers – are obsessed with creating systems of order. This is not really driven by a demand from users, so they often tend to benefit the designer, not the user.
- My second concern relates to what I believe design systems is doing to our digital experience. We’ve always had trends in graphic design (Swiss design, Flat UI, etc), but I’m getting increasingly concerned that this broad adoption of design systems is creating a design monoculture that really narrows the idea of what digital products can be.
- My third concern is that with all this talk about design systems, there’s very little talk about the real problem in digital design, which is processes and tools. Designers love making design manuals, but any design system will completely and utterly fail if it doesn’t help people in the organization produce faster and better products.
