Design Systems Week 2023

From 2 to 5 October NL Design System organises the third edition of Design Systems Week. Speakers from various organisations will join us for short talks about the how and why of design systems. This year there will be talks both in Dutch and English.

Program

These are all sessions that will be in English, with sign up links to each. You can also use the timetable to see when all sessions will be held.

All sessions can be joined online for free. You will receive a link after sign-up. This link is valid for all talks during the week. Each talk will take about 30 minutes, including time for questions.

The future of design decisions

Marco-Christian Krenn and Jan Six team up to present The future of design decisions. Delve into the transition from design tokens to dynamic design, impacting areas like accessibility, and revealing the profound implications of choices. This engaging discussion underscores the essential connection between internal decisions and the source of truth.

You get a glimpse into the future around design tokens and learn about all the possibilities.

Marco-Christian Krenn is a Design System Architect from Austria who is passionate about solving design with logical decisions, headless architecture, and design tokens. As part of Tokens Studio, he’s deeply involved in working on Generators and Resolvers, striving to innovate and enhance the field of design systems.

Jan Six is a product designer at GitHub who has been building open-source tools and plugins that help designers automate the tedious and repetitive parts. With his open source project Tokens Studio he’s building an open ecosystem around design decisions, including a Figma plugin and a platform to help make design systems work at scale and in automated ways.

Design systems as public infrastructure

Government digital services should be treated as public infrastructure in this day and age. Taiwan is in a rare position where there is an urgency to ensure digital resilience for all government services.

The design system and especially the engineering of it plays a crucial part in digital resilience as modern warfare has become increasingly digital. In this talk Mu-An will share the initiative, the challenges, and the ambitions of the Taiwanese digital services, focusing on the design system aspect.

Mu-An Chiou is Head of Design Systems at Public Digital Innovation Space, under Taiwan's Cabinet Office. She used to work at GitHub, where she worked on their design system and led efforts on accessibility and Web Components.

The GOV.UK Prototype Kit

A set of components is one thing, but the true magic comes when they are put in use together. At GOV.UK they make it easier to prototype realistic digital services in HTML, with the GOV.UK Prototype Kit. Designer Joe Lanman is involved in this project as a designer and tells you more about it!

Joe Lanman is a Design Lead at the UK Government Digital Service, based in London. He’s worked on projects including Register to Vote, Petition Parliament and the GOV.UK Prototype Kit – a way to rapidly prototype realistic services in HTML.

Joe Lanman is a Design Lead at the UK Government Digital Service, based in London. He’s worked on projects including Register to Vote, Petition Parliament and the GOV.UK Prototype Kit - a way to rapidly prototype realistic services in HTML

Estonia Design System

Aleksandr Beliaev, Nortal

Veera is a codename for a design system employed by many Estonian governmental agencies as a common UI language for the state of Estonia. Aleksandr will be talking about his and his colleagues' experiences setting up, maintaining, and supporting a component library that makes this design system breathe.

Attend if you are interested in learning from a complex real-life case study. This is a story from a country which is proud to be called the first digital society. It is also a story about managing expectations, importance of DX, self-restraint, and naming things.

Aleksandr Beliaev is a UI Development Lead at Nortal. His main expertise revolves around UI engineering and design systems. Aleksandr has been working with UI code for a bit more than 15 years. He likes his things shiny, tidied-up but liveable.

Design Systems & Web Components: what works & what doesn’t

Nord is the design system of Nordhealth, a company that makes software for healthcare professionals. Design system lead David Darnes will tell you about their experience with Web Components and how they enable reuse of Nord components across a wide variety of contexts and technologies.

Ever since the first standards for Web Components were published, developers have pondered whether they are ‘ready’ to be used in production. Today they are used in real-world projects by a lot of different organisations. Design system teams even use them in tandem with rather than instead of tools like Vue, Angular, and React.

Of course, there is lots of nuance and there are some caveats and challenges. In his talk, Dave will go into what works well and doesn’t.

Dave is Team Lead on Nord Design System at Nordhealth and has been designing, building and writing on the web for over 14 years.

DesignOps: designing the API of design teams

DesignOps is the glue that keeps a design org together, and the connective tissue that links design to other disciplines across the company, and beyond. Even if your company doesn’t have a formal DesignOps team, this work is likely being done by someone.

At GitHub, we’re thinking about our DesignOps practice as the API that connects designers to designers, and design to the wider company. Just like when designing APIs, we’ve tried things that didn’t work quite well, and have had to ship several breaking changes as we move towards a more stable release.

In this talk, you will learn:

• How to identify opportunities for DesignOps to be executed more intentionally
• How to see DesignOps as an opportunity to connect not just designers, but design to other disciplines, and design to the community
• Some things we’ve tried at GitHub that didn’t work so well — and some that did

Inayaili León is a Staff Design Program Manager at GitHub, where she focuses on design operations, documentation, and more. Previously, she was as a Senior Designer at Microsoft, working on design systems and design ops, and she led the team creating Canonical's Vanilla design system

Organisation

Design Systems Week is organised by the NL Design System core team, thanks to the support of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK) and User Needs First. All sessions can also be found there Design Systems Week 2023

Code of Conduct

All participants of Design Systems Week are expected to abide by our NL Design System Code of Conduct. By signing up for one or more sessions you've agreed to these terms.