Hi Daniel, thanks for reading and responding to the article :)

I don’t believe the future of digital products are going to be built in a one-off fashion. While I may be rejecting one extreme, I’m not saying it’s necessary to take the opposite. I’m looking at the design systems movements as an extreme example of if we take some ingredients in the design process, such as consistency and documentation, and push them too far, sacrificing other principles and needs along the way.

If you abandon design systems, it’s not to say you don’t want these elements at all, that you will do everything from scratch every time you start a new design. I argue instead that we need to understand how design systems have overly abstracted the design process and how their downsides are many and hardly ever appreciated. The alternative, its exact form, is dependent on your context, and if I were to prescribe to you a detailed alternative design process I would be doing exactly the thing I’m criticising design systems of.

There is a belief, counterproductive in my experience, that in order to scale we need ever stricter rules and centralisation of processes. If we want to scale quickly, then design systems definitely aren’t the way to go considering the time needed to build it in the first place. In fact, the most popular examples of design systems, the ‘success stories’, were introduced after a well-established company had already scaled its product offering. And the vast majority of examples detailing the downfalls of designs systems come from startups trying to scale.