Dan Mall describes why people build systems: to avoid reinventing the wheel for repeated tasks by creating consistency and efficiency. He explains that systems apply beyond digital interfaces (e.g., service onboarding) and that a design system is simply a way to do design systematically and intentionally.
Let's take the word design out of it for a sec. What do people use systems for? It's mostly for things that are repeated that you want to have some sort of consistency or efficiency with. So that could be in digital. That means maybe our interface is going to be. We want it to be more consistent. But if you take the digital part out of that for a service, you want your onboarding to be consistent. And that's a thing that applies to all different kinds of companies, whether digital or not. I think the idea of systems is we do a thing over and over again. How can we not reinvent the wheel every time and instead actually have a process for doing this and have a way that we do this? So I think design systems in general follow suit because a design system is a system. So design system really is a way to do design systematically or a way to do. If you're talking about service design, a way to do service design systematically, or a way to do any kind of design in a very intentional way.
