The future of design systems seems unclear.
Despite the way they’ve infiltrated product building processes large and small, the teams behind organizations’ design systems are constantly having to defend their own existence. Paradoxically, companies that see design systems as indispensable to profitable product development dispense of their platform teams first when profits lag.
Coupled with the rapid ascendancy of AI-branded design tooling, those of us who work on design systems may be wondering if they’ll be the last ones standing—designing the algorithmic systems that replace our laid-off peers—or the first ones cut?
How do we make sense of the apparent contradiction between the adoption of our work’s outputs and our experience of how it’s valued in organizations? How do we stop the creeping mutation of design systems from tools for people building products into a means of replacing them?
I think it’s well past time tech workers look outside of tech for perspective on these issues. One source of outside perspective I’ve found incredibly powerful in recent years is queer theory.
Queer theory 101
Queer theory is a school of critique grounded in the experiences of LGBTQ+ people. Like the word queer itself, queer theory is intentionally fluid and ambiguous. It’s both academic and activist. It combines philosophy, media criticism, sociology, and LGBTQ+ history.
Because queer theory looks to lived experience for insight, there are as many potential queer theories as there are queer people. Try as we ought to to be intersectional—to consider the way queerness interacts with race, culture, ability, and class, among other identities—there is no definitive, comprehensive queer theory because there is no singular queer experience.
To apply queer theory to design systems—to queer design systems—we can think of it as a framework, not unlike Design Thinking. Queer theory, though, is a lot less concerned with providing repeatable solutions than it is with asking new questions. However, it does offer a set of tools to better understand ourselves and our world.
To queer design systems we need to not just consider how our systems create or prevent LGBTQ+ inclusive experiences, we also need to look at how the powerful cultural dynamics that shape our experience of sex and gender also shape the way we work.
Design systems, as we’ve conceived of them so far, are constructed through a process similar to the worldview queer theory critiques. The idea is this:
Through observation—whether of a digital product or the natural world—we identify patterns, larger structures reveal themselves, rules emerge that allow us to categorize the pieces within the whole, and we keep building up from there.
Modern thinking believes there is a singular, universal definition of truth out there waiting to be discovered. Design systems want to be the single source of that truth.
Instead of buttons and links, cis-heteronormativity tells us men and women are the foundational units on which society is built. Sure, there’s some variation, but that’s all in the style layer. And there are still strong feelings about a button that looks like a link.
From there, we build up to the nuclear family—or the family molecule in this analogy. Those molecules can appear in organisms like neighborhoods, faith communities, governments but they remain fundamentally the same. There is something essential to them that dictates their function within this system. And that function is, essentially, to scale and propagate the system into the future.
In this cultural design system, the relationship between form and function is thought to be fixed and universal. Queerness and other non-normative identities are just bugs.
Throughout history to today, we’ve seen social norms, laws, and medicine deployed as patches. Diagnosing women as hysterical for failing to fulfill their gender roles. Chemically castrating gay men, like Alan Turing. Criminalizing trans people existing in public space.
Queer theory looks at institutional violence like this and asks, if this system is built on innate, immutable truths, why does it require so much enforcement to sustain itself?
Norms are designed, not born
We’ve got the relationship between the system and the live—or lived—experience backwards. Our systems aren’t derived from neutral observation of the world. Society has been designed with cisgender and heterosexuality as its defaults. We set the system in place and set about shaping the world to its rules.
Consider our atoms, man and woman. The rules dictating their intended behavior and interactions were set long before the process of scientific rigor we’re told supports this system.
We didn’t discover chromosomes’ role in sex development until the early 1900s, around the same time hormones were discovered. Those discoveries were filtered through the lens of an already existing schema for gender.
And to help propagate that knowledge, most of us were taught a simplified model of chromosomes’ and hormones’ role in sex development. People can be born with XX chromosomes and male genitals. Androgen insensitivity can lead to someone with XY chromosomes appearing phenotypically female on the outside. People can be born with any combination of chromosomes and ambiguous genitalia.
What determines what gender a baby born with an intersex condition “is”? Hormones, genitals, chromosomes, bones? Usually a doctor and their parents.
Not everyone born with an intersex condition—of which there are at least 40—needs medical intervention to live a happy, healthy life. But many receive it as infants to fit them more neatly within our binary understanding of sex and gender.
This is just one example of the ways in which our identities are defined in relation to social constructs in addition to whatever you might consider internal or essential to our minds and bodies.
People with intersex conditions make up about 1.7% of the world’s population, which for perspective, is about the same percentage as the world’s redheaded population and just a little less than the world’s jewish population.
Whether or not 2% is considered a significant slice of the population also depends on social constructs. Actually, the very idea percentages are a valid means of determining a community’s significance is itself a relatively recent norm.
In the 1830s a statistician named Adolphe Quetelet began applying averages to people, using soldiers’ measurements. The average, he believed, was the “true” or ideal measurement of a man (and yes he was mostly concerned with men). This idea became the basis of military uniform sizing, rationing, and the design of weapons.
The controls of U.S. military planes were designed based on the average measurements of a soldier until 1950. But pilots kept crashing and dying because not a single soldier was perfectly average. (Keep that in mind the next time someone on your team talks about the average user.)
This is an example of how norms are socially constructed.
Cis-heteronormativity is a product of design, which Viktor Papanek defines, in his 1971 book, Design for the Real World, as “the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order.” To, again, make over our experiences in the image of the system.
Stanford professor and journalist Fred Turner describes design as “the process by which the politics of one world become the constraints on another.”
Our design systems are both an outcome of and acts of social construction.
‘Socially constructed’ is not the same as ‘not real’ Or ‘bad.’ The way in which these norms shape our work and the ways in which our work shapes the experience of our users is very real—and can even be beneficial.
But what I hope we, as a professional community, can learn from queerness is the ability to see the invisible mechanisms of our systems for what they are, and the nerve to question if they really are benefitting us.
Design systems as discourse
Design systems should help us build toward the future, but we’ve built up the very idea of them around norms designed to recreate the past. Some of these norms, called best practices, date as far back as the printed page.
The term stereotype is a printing term, first used at the turn of the 19th century to describe a plate that duplicated blocks of typography so you didn’t have to reset the small metal type to run a page again.
Design systems are, in essence, a form of stereotyping. A means of reproducing existing solutions to ensure consistency and efficiency.
Not only do our design systems become stereotypes of our products, our processes for creating the systems themselves are also stereotyped—lifted from one organization and pressed on another.
When design system consumers feel constrained by the design system, it’s because stereotypes are, by definition, limiting. By committing something to the system, we’ve made repeating that pattern easier and creating something new, by contrast if nothing else, more difficult.
As documentation of a product’s design language, some concepts become easier or harder to express, to comprehend, depending on the construction of that language.
Intuitively, I think the design systems community understands the power of language, especially naming. Language has the power to shape the things that it describes. The chronically online among us may already recognize this process as “discourse.”
Discourse is the mechanism by which labeling a set of behaviors homosexual actually helped create a cultural identity around which a community can form.
Discourse is also what‘s transformed a collection of technical artifacts and collaborative processes into a unique discipline called design systems.
And discourse is how we draw the boundaries of what a design system is, and isn’t, and who is and isn’t part of this professional community.
How many times have you been at a design systems event and heard a speaker say something to the effect of, ”Your Figma library is not a design system,” when a Figma library happens to be what your team is organizing collaboration around?
It’s like, “fuck my drag, right?”
We talk like Figma is drag to Code’s gender. Like it’s a performative copy of something “real.” But really good drag isn’t about the imitation of gender, it’s about exposing the performative nature of all gender. Even cisgender women and men are performing against gendered ideals that, like Quetelet’s measurements of the average man, no one really fulfills. (We just don’t recognize it as easily because gender explodes more quietly than a fighter jet.)
The coded component library is also a copy of a copy of an ideal you won’t find out in the world. There is no single, “true” product for our systems to document because the product experience is created in relationship to each individual user in the context in which they use it.
Neither Figma nor code libraries are your design system. They are both affordances of the larger systems through which design work happens. They signify to the user what‘s possible through and prohibited by the system.
Have you ever been asked why a style or component is the way it is, and the answer is because that’s how an influential stakeholder wants it to be?
We encode the power dynamics of our organizations into our systems for design, and we leverage the same mindsets as cis-heteronormativity, like binary thinking, to enforce them.
Most design systems operate under the binary model of in- and out-of-system, and our criteria for joining the system is filtered through the lens of what already exists.
Like the cerulean sweater Andy wears in the Devil Wears Prada, the materials we have to choose from for our system’s components have already been picked for us—out of all the possibilities—by whatever systems preceded our own.
The process through which an idea moves from outside to inside almost always molds it to the norms of the system. Rarely is a new entry allowed to structurally change the system itself.
If something can’t be neatly categorized within the system, it’s delegated to the margins of our consideration. We maintain the system, and that is not the system. It is not our concern.
Our systems’ “others”
This idea that the role, the responsibility, of the design system and the people who build it is essentially tied to the form factor of our work is what limits us the most.
Where we draw the boundaries of our system casts every-thing and every-one on the other side of that line as Other, unknowable, and less than. Our bias toward scale implicitly aligns our systems with majority groups. The most “average” users inform all of our systems’ defaults.
To the extent that we consider minority users and use cases, our thinking is framed around providing access to the same structures as the majority instead of considering their needs as fully dimensional human beings. Instead of considering if the structures need to change.
In her book, Design Justice, Sasha Costanza-Chock dives much deeper into the way majority identities are privileged in design practices, but stresses that it’s not inherently wrong for a product to serve some users better than others. We just need to be explicit about who’s being privileged and why.
Those moments when we’re uncomfortable saying who and why out loud show us where the politics of the world in which we’re working have become constraints on our system. And those constraints often boil down to scale and efficiency.
Scale and efficiency are not particularly human-centered measures of success. But they’re measurable. They are a mechanism through which we can be seen by our organizations.
Observation plays a critical role in the formation and expression of identity. Queer theorist Michel Foucault uses the analogy of the panopticon.
The panopticon is an 19th century concept for a prison designed such that all the imprisoned people can be observed from the vantage point of a single jailer.
The jailer can’t see everyone at once, but he (and it was the 19th century, so the jailer was definitely a he) can see anyone at any given time. The imprisoned never know when they’re being observed, and so they never feel safe violating the norms of the institution.
We’ve essentially built this several times over through software. Not very mindful of us, not very demure.
The panopticon is effective not just because the jailer can see everyone, but because it encourages the observed to adopt the jailer’s mindset.
In the case of gender and sexuality, we know we are constantly being observed by society. To avoid the consequences of violating sex and gender norms, we internalize them so we can more effectively pass this constant inspection.
Making our work measurable allows us to seek institutional validation, but internalizing scale and efficiency as our measures of success also encourages us to preemptively place constraints on our work.
We’ve confused the measurements we use for signal for the things they’re meant to signify, and it’s warped how we in design systems see ourselves.
Here lies, I think, the hardest questions queer theory poses to the practice of design systems. If scale and efficiency are what guides your work:
Whose single truth are you making possible? Whose truths are you making impossible?
It seems to me that the field of design systems is oriented to a very narrow view of what it means to build products and experiences, and the more entrenched our identities as specialists become, the narrower and more rigid that perception is getting.
Seeing the shape of our deliverables as the boundaries of our work keeps us from seeing the ways in which we are gears in—and not architects of—these systems.
We’re told the future of tech is coming, and it is fixed. There is a clear binary between the people who will build that future and the people who will be erased by it. And if we don’t want to be erased by it, we in design systems must address ourselves now to building the mechanisms and rules of whatever automated systems will emerge for creating products.
We should ask ourselves, if this future is destiny, why does it require the threat of erasure to realize itself?
A queer future for design systems
Normative systems’ vision of the future is one in which the past is repeated. The technologies being loudly hailed as disruptive are, in effect, reproductive.
Queerness is oriented to a different kind of future, not just because it stands in opposition to traditional norms that exclude it. Realizing you are queer means realizing the narrative of a successful, meaningful life that’s been laid out for you was not actually written with you in mind. You have to now create your own alternative futures.
What alternative futures might we create for design systems?
There are many types of systems we can look to for inspiration: biological, ecological, political. That our systems are modeled off the mechanical and economic is a matter of the context in which they were conceived, not essential to their future.
Is there a framing of scale that encourages us to serve the largest plurality of people over the greatest majority? Can a model of conservancy serve our organizations as well as efficiency? In shifting the discourse of consistency to cohesion, can we make space for more creative engagement with the system?
This is not a call to abandon what we’ve built. Instead, I’m asking you to look critically at the underlying norms of your system and how well they are serving you.
Where is binary thinking limiting your creativity and ability to collaborate? Who is on the other side of the boundaries you’ve drawn for your work and how can you invite them in? What could you build if you took a more expansive view of your work?
There are many paths design systems can take from here, and that’s ok. Queer theory doesn’t seek to converge on a single solution. We may diverge indefinitely. Some of us may forge new professional identities.
If, like me, you’d like to find a different path from the one that’s been laid out for us, let’s learn from queerness. Learn to embrace ambiguity as an opportunity space to explore instead of an obstacle to overcome, and see what possible futures we might find there.
