Master Class: Enterprise Design System

Anyone doing design work in an enterprise environment knows: collaboration is key. Rather than designing great things yourself or within your team, the outcome of your work depends on all the other teams, their practices and decision-making. For the leading digital products and services we use on a daily basis, Design Systems have emerged as the tool of choice to support cross-team collaboration, increase productivity, quality and coherence. Rather than dictating standards from the top as we used to do with styleguides or reference materials, a Design System is designed as a product itself, to serve its users through reuse and shared understanding: helping anyone working on a product to do their work better, faster and with less effort.

An Enterprise Design System, part of the Enterprise Design Framework, follows the same idea, but reaches beyond better digital products or services to the way an enterprise is structured and constantly reshaping itself. It promotes reuse and sharing, cross-functional collaboration and coherent outcomes across a range of domains. With roots in System and Design Thinking practice, an Enterprise Design System is a tool made for teams involved in redesigning and transforming parts of the enterprise, such as new products or services, processes or organizations.

Designed as a collection of reusable and interconnected building blocks, it regroups the elements needed to co-design and deliver better solutions, faster and more coherently than in isolation: guiding principles for a common purpose, data and insight, reusable pattern libraries, tools for automation and algorithms, and collaboration platforms for cross-team learning to run experiments at scale. The System provides the ingredients and guidance needed to implement solutions that deliver positive impact on the enterprise, itself represented as system landscape. It enables enterprise stakeholders and teams build the right thing the right way.

In this master class, we will go through the process of planning and designing an Enterprise Design System: identifying existing systems and their landscape across the enterprise, and determining a suitable scope for a first "minimum viable" System. We will use the Enterprise Design Stack as a checklist on the potential principles, patterns and assets to consider for inclusion in your System, and the range of parameters to be decided for its introduction and adoption. We will also discuss practical cases of such Systems applied to different contexts.