Build half a good system
Finding inspiration in the architectural practice of incremental building and participatory design
Sometimes I feel design systems, even design systems I’ve helped build, don’t leave enough space undefined. In trying to solve everything, limit the effectiveness of the system overall. We ask for creativity to spring forth only within contained boxes where it plays nicely with the rest of our components. The logic is rational for any systems designer. We know a harmonious whole is more powerful than the sum of parts, so we prioritize the whole system. You could even argue that is the whole job of a design system. Let’s for a minute consider a definition of design systems from an article by Audrey Hacq.
A Design System is the single source of truth which groups all the elements that will allow the teams to design, realize and develop a product.
There are, of course, many other definitions to pick from, but I think the quote aligns with a mental model that many designers hold. We think a design system is one place for everything, and so if it does not contain everything, the design system is a failure.
That idea to get everything tidily arranged in a perfect system reminds me of grand utopian visions proposed by modern architects. The most famous and visionary was Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) master plan by Le Corbusier. Replacing the chaotic tumult of an unplanned city with fastidiously organized efficiency has inspired a generation of architects and urban planners even though Ville Radieuse was never built.
Planners boldly reconfigured cities, carving up neighborhoods with highways and constructing massive housing towers. The motivates may have been good but, the projects modeled on Ville Radieus failed to deliver miraculous results and often magnified the problems they were meant to solve.
What does this have to do with design systems? Just like a beautiful master plan, a design system that takes on too much upfront will surely collapse. But we are not without hope! In fact, another architectural planning model could hearten us. I’ll turn to Incremental Building and Participatory Design concepts, perhaps most perfectly illustrated by the Chilean architecture firm Elemental led by Alejandro Arvena at Ville Verde for inspiration.
Elemental was selected to help the city of Constitución on the coast of Chile recover from a disaster. In 2010 a powerful earthquake and tidal wave combined to cause the death of 5000 people and destroy 80% of buildings in the city. People needed housing built quickly, and the government of Chile had a modest budget to do it. Aravena saw the money would not cover the build of high-quality housing for everyone. Instead, they proposed building half the house well and providing a framework for residents to expand into. Elemental would provide the parts of the house that were difficult for residents to create on their own. So residents moved into a small house with a solid foundation of concrete, a leakproof roof, efficient insulation, electrical connections, plumbing, and utility connections. They would then use their own labor and ingenuity to build what they needed in the other half. Elemental provided an operating manual to guide projects and conducted workshops teaching basic construction techniques.
How did Aravena decide what to include in the built half? The Elemental team deployed a technique called “Participatory Design.” Essentially that means talking to future residents to understand the problem. That cycle of qualitative research and synthesis should be very familiar to UX practitioners. Aravena says it helped them frame the right problem because “There’s nothing worse than answering the wrong questions well.”
There’s a lot of misunderstanding of participatory design. You’re not asking people for the answers. What we’re trying to do is to identify what is the problem. What we’re trying to do by asking people to participate is envision what is the question, not what is the answer.
— Alejandro Aravena
I hope you can see where this is going for designers of systems. We can lean into creating the parts of a design system that are hard for users of the system to build on their own, then leave space for expansion. How do we know what parts are hard for teams to build on their own? The questions a design system answers will likely be different for every organization. Your situation is probably not the same faced by Google, so your answer shouldn’t look like a Material Design System. I suggest using techniques like participatory design, not to get help with solutions, but to more deeply understand problems, and in the end, to build half a system well. I don’t mean “half a good system” in the MVP sense of the word, where a product team will turn a skateboard into a car given enough time. I mean that we should intentionally leave white space and invite others to fill it. It is not just prepackaged boxes to “be creative in,” but we could open up half the system and let its users set the direction.
Many of our projects are not finished by us, but by the families themselves. So we are really thankful to those families that have completed and added their resources, ideas, and dreams to the walls and roofs that we have set only as a frame.
— Alejandro Aravena
If we can infuse our design systems with that level of humble gratitude and appreciation for the contribution of our users as collaborators, we’ll all be better off for it.
How did Ville Verde work? Aravena was recognized with the Pritzker Prize, one of architecture's highest awards, in 2016. More revealing however is this testimonial video where we hear from Ville Verde residents three years later. More on Ville Verde can be found at 99% Invisible, Aravena’s Ted Talk, and an interview on Dezeen.
