Have you ever thought about the design of systems?

Chances are you’ll at least have heard of system design, but it may or may not mean the same thing even to different designers. Frankly, I often feel like the words “system design” are used as lip service to the Product Design gods rather than being used to communicate anything of importance. 

Yet, it’s a positively vital concept to learn for many different trades.

Here’s my very simple definition:

System Design is the creation of a Positive Reinforcing Loop — on purpose.

System design can be applied to anything — even something as mundane as laundry. 

Let’s say you have a pile of clothes but you don’t have enough room in your closet to hang them. Because you don’t have a place for all of them to go, they keep piling up on your chair. Soon, your chair fills up with clothes and you start putting the overflow on top of your nightstand. The nightstand fills up and the clothes start piling up on the floor.  Soon, you can’t even move in your room without tripping over the clothes on the floor. This is an example of a Negative Reinforcing Loop, in which repeating actions or behaviors tend to throw things into greater and greater disarray.

It may seem like the whole room is a disaster, but the root cause isn’t a such a hard problem to fix.  The systems design approach would be to take inventory of the number of items of clothing and the available spaces for them, increasing the space and/or decreasing the number of clothes, and then assign them to specific places, so that putting them away is straightforward and can be performed automatically. This is an example of a Positive Reinforcing Loop.

You can imagine how this concept might be extrapolated to organizing files on a server or designing a page layout.

System design is important whether you’re working on a brand, or social assets, or A/V, or a website, or anything you can think of.  Even if your trade involves wordsmithing, it still benefits you to practice system design in the way you structure chapters in a book or buttons names on a website.

A page design is never one design when you’re working within a system. A social post is never one piece of content. A title or intro is never one piece of motion.  

It’s one element PLUS testing it for all content types PLUS adapting the design for different breakpoints and usage scenarios PLUS updating any impacted components that are used across the whole. Changing the size of button means not only looking at the impact of this one page the button is on, but everywhere else it appears. It’s important to be aware of the interconnectedness of the whole. Assume that any change creates a ripple effect — and deliberately try to “break” your design by pressure-testing it under different conditions, with different content. Research what came before, and have it handy to reference so that you understand the scope of impact of changes. 

Designing a good system can take a lot longer than just thinking about one little piece. While you don’t want to get bogged down in a system, afraid to innovate, you also don’t want to jump through updates too quickly to be able to properly test them. It’s a balancing act.  Sometimes you’re “zoomed in” and sometimes you’re “zoomed out”. 

Because system design is patient and methodical, it often seems “not cool enough” to others. People will complain about what’s not working, but don’t often move beyond treating the symptoms of the bad system to get at the root cause. They often prefer to work on whatever is new and shiny and — something that doesn’t involve having to sort through tangles, where THEY’re the one whose ideas are front and center. 

But leading a project often involves having to get a team of people to work together to create something, which, guess what? Is usually SOME type of system. So, you can’t avoid it.

You want to know what’s REALLY unglamorous? Having to get on a work call at 2am because a bad system broke down in the middle of the night. 

System Design is a critical leadership skill. It’s what you apply when you create a budget, estimate timing for delivering a project, or delegate to your team. It’s one of those softer, yet still very technical skills — that go a long ways towards showing your clients that you’re worth your fee, or your boss that you’re ready for the next level of responsibility. A creative who puts in the effort to develop their systems design skills is a triple threat.