#systems (15 links)
It is the systematic loss of responsibility, reflection, and intuition. These habits do not stop at the level of the individual. They scale. They become culture. And culture, eventually, becomes politics.
- Beyond Components: Building a Design Language System at Scale | Design Systems Collective designsystemscollective.com
Most “design systems” stop at components. A Design Language System (DLS) defines the language your components and teams speak: design tokens as the vocabulary and semantic HTML/CSS as the grammar, implemented in the layout layer as a stable framework-agnostic DOM + token contract.
- Whale Fall nesbitt.io
What happens when a large open source project dies.
This is a great software ecosystem/evolution post.
- Why Some People See Collapse Earlier Than Others adrianlambert.substack.com
Those who have been told they are “too much,” “too intense,” or “too literal,” often turn out to have been responding to conditions that others were able to avoid seeing. They noticed something real, and they noticed it early, not because they were broken, but because the dominant cultural paradigm was. For people whose perception is attuned closely to the world as it is, collapse awareness is not a failure of coping, but an understandable response to the realities of an overextended and collapsing civilisation.
- TBM 389: Overthinker! cutlefish.substack.com
From a young age, being accused of “overcomplicating” or “overthinking” things felt like a dismissal of who I was.
Between reality and models.
- Why “Systems Thinking” Isn’t Enough Anymore prairieoyster24.substack.com
Systems thinking emerged in the mid-20th century as a corrective to reductionism. It gave managers a language for interconnections, feedback, and unintended consequences. That was progress, for its time. But now the theory is showing its age.
When systems try to meet everyone's needs, they don't stand for anything unique. Without a strong opinion, you can have an infinitely flexible but ultimately forgettable set of rules and constraints.
- Patterns in Design Systems iknowdavehouse.medium.com
A few years ago, while working on the GOV.UK Design System I spent probably a little too much time thinking about the differences between Components and Patterns.
- Systemic Games: A Design Philosophy the-artifice.com
- Edgar Schein: Humble Inquiry (2013) | by Philippe Vandenbroeck | Medium philippevandenbroeck.medium.com
I am getting more and more convinced that big, systemic change takes root in conscious but modest shifts in behaviour and thought. The argument developed in this short book confirms this: asking the right questions, from an authentic attitude of respect and curiosity, is the basis for building trusting relationships; trust facilitates better task-related communication and, thereby, ensures collaboration to get the job done.
- Dieter Helm: “Capitalism works best with a strong state” magazine.newstatesman.com
Helm recently described the UK’s privatised utilities as “not fit for purpose”, but he thinks it is not a matter of “private bad, public good”. “Neither the nationalisation model nor the pure privatisation that we’ve inherited are fit for purpose,” he said. Rather, Helm sees it as the job of the state to provide rules – a “system framework” – within which the private sector competes.
- Extending Styles — Philip Walton philipwalton.com
- Design Principles learndesignprinciples.com
<blockquote>Learn about design principles and see how they can be applied from architecture to product design.</blockquote>