Design Systems and beyond
By: Marcos Peebles
Tags: Design Systems

So, now you have a Design System. Congratulations!

Your journey(s) must have been quite something. From buy-in, to spreading the love, from that one person band to a small dedicated team to full governance, from that style guide you called your Design System to the beast it has become, from launch to augment and maintain.

“The castle! Our quest is at an end” — http://www.montypython.com/.

You have somehow achieved what certain would consider -including me- the most underrated and misunderstood pinnacle of digital organisations. Your ecosystem is now thriving, you are **spot on** and probably way ahead of your competitors, peers and time.

You made it!

Happy Days

You are delivering digital products faster than last year, and you have reduced costs in ridiculous ways and improved consistency and quality of all your touch-points. After the initial grindings, people and teams are happy, and they concentrate on cool things, not repetitive tasks. And those pipelines and processes, true things of beauty. The individuals and teams involved in the process all stayed at the company (beat that…), and you have attracted more talent than ever. Actually, you are **so good** that Business Strategy, Design and Technology are working as one big family and distant cousins of your organisation have joined the party. One single source of truth. You found the true Holy Grail. I want to be you.

So, what now? Sit and relax?

Let me be bold, wouldn’t that be the equivalent of building mosaic, moving to Netscape and call it quits? Ok Google, Siri, Alexa and 2 others liked this.

As Design and Design Systems have entered the space in larger and larger organisations, roles have morphed and emerged. Head of Design Operations, DesignOps, Design System Designer (yikes), Design System Advocate, Susan, whatever…

As Design now interacts (blends?) with Technology to answer Strategic, Business, and User needs, you have set the basic building blocks for today and tomorrow.

Some Thoughts

Let us assume we know what is happening today.

What about the day after? And after? I don’t know. Nevertheless, here goes Nostramarcos quick, non-exhaustive, today ‘n tomorrow‘s list:

Ethics and Inclusivity (Yes, ala David Attenborough);

VUI and CUI (Voice User Interaction/interface/interaction and Conversational User Interaction/interface/interaction);

Towards universal design tokens and patterns;

Machine Learning for all repetitive, non-value-added tasks, then Deep Learning and onwards to AI; Machine Learning for Pattern Recognition;

Data to infer decisions (this works better than that, this user needs that instead of this…);

As Content is Queen , “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them”, letting all the field of knowledge management enter the scene;

, “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them”, letting all the field of knowledge management enter the scene; As Context is King , context-aware touchpoints at all times; and let the King Subjects Emotions and Situations be taken into account to understand the why’s;

, context-aware touchpoints at all times; and let the King Subjects Emotions and Situations be taken into account to understand the why’s; Enhancing your creative process even more through human intent design;

Smart applications deployed better and faster;

Insert [next tech or trend here] into your processes and flow seamless, as in not after 2 years;

The list goes on and on…



What is your list?

PD: I wrote this somewhere back in 2018, found the draft and just published it, still relevant i.m.h.o.