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DESIGN
Design systems are one of the most powerful tools transforming the design discipline to date
Learn about the unexpected ways design systems are impacting the design process
Caught in the rat-race: We’ve all been there, caught in the hamster wheel of production design.
You’re churning out comps without so much as a side-eye toward the persona you crafted months ago.
In the moments between frantic mouse clicks and sipping coffee, you spot the personas slouching on the wall. In all of their abandon, they are hanging on with a thread of tape and are slowly fading with sun damage. Not even the researcher has looked at them in weeks.
Indeed, all too often, production design sits under the thinly veiled title, “user experience design”. Orders are disguised as “requirements”, though everyone knows the problem has already been solved. At lunchtime, your peers leave to catch some sun but you are shackled to your computer. You begin to wonder why you are constantly churning out the same designs, yet only making simple changes. You’ve studied human-centered design. You’ve put in the hours.
Let’s rewind for a moment
Before you decided you wanted to be a designer, you discovered your infatuation with “play”. You played throughout childhood — which, you soon discovered, was how you learn best. You had an eagerness to continue learning, which landed you in a lecture hall months after you graduated from high school. In your very first lecture, you were told experimentation is an essential part of the design process.
Upon graduating from college you were hired. Success. On your first day, you walked into an office that was adorned with busy pinboards, rainbow stickie notes, and whiteboard scribbles. Peering into a conference room, you saw toothpick prototypes and lego models. There was a laser printer jerking back and forth behind your desk, but you were too excited to let it bother you. Weeks into your new job, you realized something felt strange.
But you were new, so you presumed the mundane tasks were just part of the rite of passage.
