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The Question is a collaborative learning podcast about Design Systems. Smart people like you sign up, answer a few niche questions about design systems for each episode, and then we all get together to unpack the data we've gathered. Each week, I'll invite a new co-host to help facilitate the conversation. After the deep dive, the co-host and I record a recap of what we learned. That means, for each episode, you can listen to the recap and the full deep dive!
If you're a design system practitioner, subscribe today (https://bencallahan.com/the-question) to receive an invitation to each episode. This only works if the community joins in!
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Ben Callahan (00:00)
Hi everybody. Welcome to the recap for episode 66 of the question. My friend Laura Kalbag is here and we talked about the design system learning curve. was a really fun conversation. Laura, thank you so much for hopping right back onto a call with me to try to unpack some of the things we learned. We just got off the deep dive. We had a ton of folks there. We had a lot of answers this week and such a good and nuanced conversation around education and learning and systems.
Laura (00:15)
You
Ben Callahan (00:28)
Did you, how are you feeling after having gone through that deep dive?
Laura (00:34)
I'm feeling really hopeful actually. think that I came at it with so many questions and so many concerns about the learning curve of design systems and how do we help people that are new into systems? How do we mature as a community and learn from each other in a way that's effective? And I've come out of it with so many ideas and thoughts and different threads that we could follow and
Ben Callahan (00:37)
goodness that's
Laura (01:04)
I love that. It's been great.
Ben Callahan (01:04)
Yeah,
that's so good. love that. I'm glad you didn't come out fearful. ⁓ Tell me, I want to know, we didn't really talk about this in the deep dive, but I want to know what's happening in your world right now that sort of led you to this kind of
Laura (01:09)
Hahaha
Well, I know that something that you and I have in common is that because we're often educating people in the realm of design and adjacent areas, I'm always trying to think of how do I, the things that I've been learning and working on, how do I bring other people into that? How do I make this accessible to
more people. That's why I got into the web in the first place as a form of technology because I loved that other people were sharing it and letting me into that. And with my work right now with Pempot, a lot of what I'm doing is I'm basically teaching people how to do design and development to some degree and I want to help people get into the industry. I want to help people
learn what it takes to be a professional in the industry in a way that is friendly and not gatekeeper-y and I think that this is a huge part of that is how do we make design systems an environment that people can work in and that they feel comfortable joining.
Ben Callahan (02:34)
And having spent ⁓ some time with you in Madrid at Penpot Fest last year and ⁓ in October in Bristol ⁓ at Converge, I know this is such an authentic part of who you are. It's so cool to hear you kind of express it in this way, but your background in accessibility for the web carries through now into how you want people to learn, like making accessible learning opportunities is kind of what I hear you saying. It's so good. It's so who you are.
Laura (03:03)
Yeah, and I loved some of the directions that the conversation took today because it came through that that's, I'm not unique in that, that is something that's actually quite common to a lot of the desire systems community is that desire to share and to bring other people in and not to make it about how do I as an individual make money from this and exploit this opportunity, but
Ben Callahan (03:31)
Yeah.
Laura (03:32)
how do I bring other people in like me?
Ben Callahan (03:36)
Yeah, that was definitely a thread. And honestly, it's something that I see in every episode, right? The way that the question is structured doesn't work if people don't have that attitude. So ⁓ in a sense, I think it is a part of the DNA of the industry, of the systems space, you know? ⁓ I wanted to call one thing out right away, which is, you know, the first, we asked four questions this week. ⁓
One of the very first one was, do you feel qualified to be a design system specialist? And I was not, I had no idea what kind of answers we'd get to this. Because I talked to a lot of folks in the system space and I do hear a lot of folks express this, the word we use is like imposter syndrome, Like this sort of like feeling like they just are not really qualified for the role that they're in. ⁓ I think.
Laura (04:10)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ben Callahan (04:30)
It's a topic that has been talked about a lot in our space, you know, and ⁓ it seems to me like it's maybe a little bit more ⁓ prevalent here in systems. And I wondered if you have a sense for why that might be. Like, there something that you think is unique about this space or?
Laura (04:48)
I think when we look through a lot of the responses in terms of how people learned about design systems and felt like they developed the level of expertise that they have, so much of that is people saying that they are self-taught. And I think that it was also prompted by later on a comment talking about the idea of standards, people were also seeking reassurance that what they
know is the right thing or is a best practice. And so I think that those things do go hand in hand. I think there's one of those things you see is when someone is self-taught, they haven't had a qualification handed down to them by an academic institution or otherwise. And so I think there is a lack of like being sure in yourself in that scenario.
Ben Callahan (05:43)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a really good, I didn't, I wasn't thinking about that correlation between like, like almost every, almost every answer to the, think it was the second question, which was how have you learned the skills needed to work as a design system practitioner? Almost every answer talked about, you know, it's like grit, you know, it's like, I'm scrappy. I just go figure things out. I, I ask questions. I talk to people, I experiment, you know, it's not like you can go get a degree, you know, in this. ⁓
Laura (05:51)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ben Callahan (06:12)
And so it does require individuals who, ⁓ you know, who are maybe more system minded. What was the quote? Somebody brought a quote. you, my gosh, it was so good.
Laura (06:21)
I've got that written down. It was Greg
who bought this quote to us and it was something that Greg said that he'd read elsewhere. ⁓ As with many of the folks, everyone is always referring to the people that they have learned from and not taking credit for themselves. The people who see systems are the ones who make them.
Ben Callahan (06:43)
That's so good. And it's like a theme in almost all of our, all of our episodes, because I always ask my co-hosts how they got into systems. And inevitably people who are like in the system space, they see systems everywhere, you know, and, that's, quote just embodies that sort of reality for us so well. And I think in the, the conversation earlier, we talked about this idea that there's benefits to that.
Right? Like it makes you a good design system practitioner, but it also has another side. You know, we've done episodes in the past with Lauren Leprette, where we talked about just managing your system's brain. You know, like how do you turn that off in your personal life when everything that you look at and see is a system and you see the implications of decisions that people are making and things like this. I think it's, yeah, it's tricky. Yeah.
Laura (07:23)
Mm.
Yeah, and you brought that up during the discussion
and you mentioned the risk of burnout in that scenario, but I also pointed out the potential that we over codify things as systems thinkers and we can, in a way that can feel quite over structured and counter to innovation to the people who are consuming the design systems, they can find that it's too restrictive.
often if we do tend to over codify things in that way. I do think along that line what Ismael and Yessenia, both of them were pointing out that the systems thinking is why a lot of people need to work in other roles first as well. That often if you come from a product design or development background, or I think even Ismael mentioned
Ben Callahan (08:07)
Yeah.
Mmm.
Laura (08:30)
product management is very valuable in terms of systems thinking. And Yesenia too saying that design systems in itself has become such a broad field that it's not one role and that specializing in a role could be very valuable to people. Yesenia really knows what she's talking about. She's had an expertise in design systems for such a long time and worked with a lot of people in that.
Ben Callahan (08:32)
Yeah.
Yeah, she does.
Yes.
Laura (08:59)
I would definitely take that recommendation.
Ben Callahan (09:00)
Yeah,
a hundred percent. She's co-hosting our next episode too. So I'm really excited to have her join. And she talked about one of the things that she talked about was like, you know, it's one thing to know how to design things, the product. It's one thing to know how to take that design in the product space and systematize it so it can be used by multiple products. And it's a whole nother thing to figure out how do you change an organization's
Laura (09:05)
are fabulous.
Mm-hmm.
Ben Callahan (09:26)
perspective on making interface, you know, like the organizational change side of this work is so huge. And I think that for me, like this is where I've, I've put so much of my energy over the last few years is like, I feel like there's a lot of material on like how to make a component in Figma or in Pen Pot or whatever tool. There's a lot of material on how to make a component in React or pick your framework. You know, there's not so much material on how to change the perspective of your
Laura (09:26)
Yeah.
Mm.
Ben Callahan (09:55)
VP of product, you know, in a way that creates incentives for people to use systems. And that's like a different level of thinking that is not part of the normal designer developer learning, you know.
Laura (10:08)
Yeah, well,
I think if you don't mind me taking us onto one of the later questions that we have, because I think it's relevant here, was when we were talking about, do you believe that we need a set of industry-wide design system standards? So the example that you gave was what the W3C provide in terms of web standards for, accessibility in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or there's some... ⁓
Ben Callahan (10:11)
Please.
Laura (10:35)
privacy ones and there's also, yeah, there's also protocols, there's design tokens, standard that's been emerging that's in like quite a relevant field right now. But one of the, talking on the people side of things and the process side of things, one of the things that really came out of this conversation for me was the idea that we don't necessarily need so much standards around those components and around those things, but it is.
helping people with the processes around creating a system. The idea that we want its frameworks of principles rather than prescription. And I think that that's a fascinating thing that we could learn from other people is the how to do the people side.
Ben Callahan (11:15)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
And those are problems that like other industries have had to solve too, right? Like we're not the first people to realize that it's hard to change an organization, certainly. ⁓ So that's where I'm always looking to like other spaces, you know, and I think a lot of systems thinkers do this, right? We see, like we said, we see systems everywhere. So why not look at architecture? Why not look at, you know, whatever, you know, ⁓ even just like the way
Laura (11:30)
Mm-mm. No.
Mm-hmm.
Ben Callahan (11:51)
sort of scientific papers are evaluated. There's like such a rigor in that space. And I feel like we're missing some of that in our space too, you know, ⁓ things like that I'm always curious about, but what for you, like how have you learned or have you had the opportunity to kind of experiment with and learn some of the org change stuff, some of the culture stuff, like where is that in your career, where has that shown its head?
Laura (11:55)
Mmm.
Yeah, well for me, part of the issue is that when I was working with doing client work, I was always being brought in for very short periods of time, which is, it's impossible to create change in that time really. And ⁓ that's one of the things that got me into design systems was this idea of, okay, how can I leave a system behind that other people can build upon and work with rather than temporary work? And...
So the people side of it is so much harder. when, after Converge, one of the things that I took back to the PEMPOT team was, and I mentioned this in discussion, was not the tools. You can only provide so much as someone that's building a design platform or a design tool for design systems folks, because really the gnarliest problems that people are trying to solve are around.
Ben Callahan (12:45)
Yeah.
Laura (13:11)
people. actually, was one thing that Yesenia mentioned that I thought was really interesting was there's already component galleries out there, but why not have a gallery of solutions to user problems and different ways that those have been solved. Thinking, flipping it around in terms of it's not about tools, it's not about components. It's again, whether it's on the consuming design systems or
as a person who is using something that is built using a design system, how do we solve those problems?
Ben Callahan (13:43)
Yeah,
yeah, that was such an interesting part of the conversation. You know, I think ⁓ we were talking about standards at that time. you're right. Yesenia mentioned that idea of a gallery of the user problems. Stephen came back to that and was like,
Laura (13:52)
Mm-hmm.
Ben Callahan (14:00)
I want to see examples of how teams are articulating problems and values across different organizations. I thought that, my goodness, yeah. Like it takes us as a consultant, as a coach, it takes a lot of time. It can take us three to six months to clearly articulate the values and principles that a design system is sort of positing to the rest of the organization that we all follow. know, it's a long process. takes a lot of collaborative work.
Laura (14:05)
Mm-hmm.
Ben Callahan (14:27)
you know, sessions where we're pulling out of people the things they care about and trying to identify how do we focus those in and find the ones where there's commonality across the org. You know, so it's a lot of work to do that. And a way that we could sort of show here's how teams have done that. Here's the process they've used. Here's the output they're generating that's actually worked, you know, ⁓ so many good, so many good ideas there.
Laura (14:39)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Was it also Stephen that said about the idea that if you are sharing your values effectively as part of your design system, then in his experience, the things can follow from that more easily, like the rest of the design system flows. And that became quite an interesting discussion generally, I think, values in your systems, because one of the...
Ben Callahan (15:07)
Yeah.
Laura (15:18)
questions when we were talking about standards was who defines the standards? Like for me, as someone who has a not-for-profit around trying to build things that are not big tech, that are small tech, that don't have those same values as big tech organizations, how much of those values do we embed in design systems? And do we want to be copying design system principles from the organizations that don't necessarily share our values?
Ben Callahan (15:24)
Yeah.
Laura (15:49)
And I thought that was, it was that fascinating example of, was accessibility standards and getting certified and paying someone to get a certification in that. And should standards be something that are in a top-down structure, handed down to us, or should it be, I guess, a culture that we've...
Ben Callahan (15:57)
Yeah. Yes.
Laura (16:16)
got from, to some degree, open source or free and open culture of how do we build things together as a community rather than being an individual or organisation handing them down to...
Ben Callahan (16:19)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right. Yeah. Like the idea that I can exchange money for, you know, ⁓ some sort of credibility in a craft is foreign to me, other than I guess that's higher education to a certain extent. Yeah.
Laura (16:39)
Mm-hmm.
Yes, I was just thinking that that is
and but to be honest that was also one of the flaws of academia for me I went to art school I studied design I came out of that feeling so confident and cocky about my ability in design only to very quickly learn over time how little I knew and how little I was prepared for the professional world and that's one of the things that I
Ben Callahan (17:10)
Yeah.
Laura (17:13)
try to do now is create materials that I feel that help people work as professionals and what's current, what's practical information not just academic or theoretical information.
Ben Callahan (17:21)
Yeah.
Yeah, my goodness, that's so good. We used to run my company Sparkbox. We do a lot of product design development, system design and development for larger organizations. And for a long time, for maybe 10 years, we ran an apprenticeship program. It was a paid position. And ⁓ we would pay you for six months, basically just to learn. Because what we found is that everybody we hired right out of school, it was what you said. They kind of were very excited to be working.
but they really did not have the skills to operate in the environment in which we needed them to. And so we developed our own curriculum and everybody on our team took time to kind of mentor these folks. And at the end of six months, you know, we would sort of make some offers to bring folks on. many of our, in fact, we still have people now, there's one of our technical directors right now at Sparkbox who started as an apprentice and just has worked her way up that, you know, the ladder of her career ladder, you know, by just
Laura (18:04)
Mm-hmm.
Ben Callahan (18:28)
growing and showing such promise. so I think that for us, that's been a big part of our DNA, but I don't think that's common in the space, you know? And ⁓ yeah, especially in the world we're in now where it's like, you know, we can get into a whole nother thread on like AI and how it's sort of usurping entry level positions and you know, what that's gonna do for us long-term. I don't know that we need to go there right now in this conversation, but there's a lot to unpack.
Laura (18:36)
No.
Mm-mm.
Well, and it's also impacting learning generally because I think we discussed how do we create learning paths for people in order to go from someone who maybe hasn't worked inside of design systems to feeling maybe like they have some level of competency. mean, we already discussed how most people don't, but I think the AI is impacting that because the amount of
Ben Callahan (19:05)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Laura (19:24)
It's difficult to find information that you know is good, that you know is giving you good advice, that is not just something that is generated poorly in order to create sort of search engine and optimized content that, yeah, it's machines talking to machines and there's no human information in there. And I do think that that is something that we could really share as a community.
Ben Callahan (19:29)
Yeah.
It really is. Yeah.
Laura (19:54)
and start to pull resources. It's one of the values of the human connection in this and what you're building in terms of a community is that helps cut through irrelevant information to the good stuff.
Ben Callahan (19:59)
Yeah.
Yeah.
yeah. It's so good. I mean, to put a finer point on that concept, I think one of the things we saw in the answers around, you know, standardization was instead of pushing for some sort of top-down standard, like we've talked about, could we have one that is more like acknowledging there's a lot of really good content out there, but it's, it's spread out. It's hard to find. It's hard to validate. Like you just said. So as a community, could we gather the right resources for
Laura (20:22)
Mm-hmm.
Ben Callahan (20:36)
specific folks at specific points of their career to help them figure out how to kind of come into the space with confidence. And, you I don't know what that looks like. There's a lot of work to do there. But ⁓ I think I think there's a lot of value in something like that, you know.
Laura (20:52)
Yeah, I feel like this could be a starting point for that. Like, this is where we begin.
Ben Callahan (20:55)
I think so. Yeah. mean, I
know, right? I love that. Gosh, is there anything else that sort of stuck out to you from the conversation?
Laura (21:04)
I'm trying to, I'm looking through my notes as well. I've got so many like brilliant things, like even, yes, there are so many component galleries out there. What if the standards are building upon the existing HTML elements, the patterns of, we're so many, we're reinventing the wheel of this HTML element plus another HTML element equals a pattern. And why don't we have the, I think that's something that,
Ben Callahan (21:10)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Laura (21:34)
lot of people mentioned was Brad Frost's idea of the global design system could be a part of that idea of standardisation as well.
Ben Callahan (21:46)
Yeah, absolutely. One thing that I think was ⁓ a nice comment, Taylor mentioned this idea that he sort of sees as an industry that we're kind of in a unique space right now where, know, design systems as a practice is pretty new. Although we've been thinking about, you know, system thinking forever, right? But ⁓ as a practice, you know, maybe a decade, you know, folks have had formal positions in the space. And we're at a point now where
those folks who started ⁓ early days as design system practitioners are now leading teams. They're now, know, VPs. They're now in leadership in organizations and understand they come with context from being an IC in the space. And that maybe in his, I think in his mind, he was sort of suggesting that's like, that puts us kind of on the edge of something new, right?
Laura (22:18)
Mm.
Ben Callahan (22:34)
maybe there's a little bit more fertile soil inside of lot of these organizations when they elevate folks from the practice into leadership. So I'm excited about that. And I hadn't thought about it quite like that. And I think your response was such a authentic response from you, which is like, okay, so how do we get the pipeline to help folks come into those roles? So yeah.
Laura (22:42)
Mm.
Yeah, I'm always thinking
⁓ that of, okay, it's great that that exists and so how can we get the benefit of that leadership, that expertise, that time spent? Is there a way of making that more accessible to everybody else?
Ben Callahan (23:14)
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I am so grateful, Laura, for you, for your time, for your wisdom and for you sharing your expertise today and just helping facilitate such a meaningful conversation. There is so much good material in that FigJam file. If you have not had an opportunity to go take a look at that or dig into it, please do so. ⁓ Thank you so much for being here.
Laura (23:31)
yeah.
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to the community as well for your ⁓ insight. It's ⁓ been incredible, such fun.
Ben Callahan (23:46)
Yes, and we'll see you soon, Laura. Thank you. Cheers.
Laura (23:49)
Cheers, bye bye.