Systems Thinking, Unlocked – Airbnb Design

Burn baby burnout by Amy Hupe, content designer.

Here’s the transcript of a great talk by Amy on the realities of working on design systems.

Get it shipped — building better relationships with Devs

This advice works both ways:

1. Collaboration
2. Communication
3. Respect

Quality Is Systemic - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Software quality is more the result of a system designed to produce quality, and not so much the result of individual performance. That is: a group of mediocre programmers working with a structure designed to produce quality will produce better software than a group of fantastic programmers working in a system designed with other goals.

This talks about development, but I believe it applies equally—if not more—to design.

And this is very insightful:

Instead of spending tons of time and effort on hiring because you believe that you can “only hire the best”, direct some of that effort towards building a system that produces great results out of a wider spectrum of individual performance.

SydCSS 7th Birthday with Ethan Marcotte - YouTube

A great talk by Ethan called The Design Systems Between Us.

The design systems between us. — Ethan Marcotte

Smart thoughts from Ethan on how design systems can cement your existing ways of working, but can’t magically change how collaboration works at your organisation.

Modern digital teams rarely discuss decisions in terms of the collaborative costs they incur. It’s tempting—and natural!—to see design- or engineering-related decisions in isolation: that selecting Vue as a front-end framework only impacts the engineering team, or that migrating to Figma only impacts designers. But each of these changes the way that team works, which impacts how other teams will work and collaborate with them.