Suffering from Success: Defending and Extending Design Systems

Design systems are repositories containing standardized patterns, reusable components, and documentation for creating user interfaces. They have gained popularity in industry by reducing development time and improving user experience. However, recent grey literature criticism claims that by virtue of their standardization, design systems constrain creativity, become increasingly inflexible, and ignore design context. To investigate this, I interviewed five design system practitioners to gain their perspectives on these concerns and the current state of design systems. I found that while these criticisms hold merit on the surface, they often are misguided or lack sufficient context, leading to a reaffirmation of the value of design systems. That said, practitioners also highlighted possible design system improvements, including incorporating artificial intelligence and the need to improve collaboration processes. These findings should help guide organizations to better implement, maintain, and extend design systems, while simultaneously strengthening the academic literature surrounding them, which has been lacking.