Design system

So you just published the state of...

What is it, state of AI and design systems? MARK MIRCHANDANI- State of AI and

design systems, beyond the hype.

What are design systems out there doing? Obviously, I only have access to publicly available design systems.

I wish I had access to, I could probably get Fable to hack into the mainframes.

MARK MIRCHANDANI- Probably.

And you technically can do that.

And you technically can set effort to low and get something that you could technically call a design system in a minute or two.

Yeah.

Uh, so Southleft is, is an agency that I created that's mainly a design systems consultancy.

Mm-hmm.

Uh-huh.

So she's doing great.

And, uh, we partnered up with, uh, uh, a fellow named Joey Banks, who some of you may know, uh, with Baseline.

And so they're all still fighting the good fight with design systems and helping a lot of organizations figure out how to weave AI into their design system workflows.

Yeah.

Today, I'm excited to talk to Dave House.

Dave is a design systems specialist that has spent the last decade working on design systems for organizations like GOV.UK, BT, Lloyds Banking Group, and most recently, Dentally, a management system for dental practices.

He lives in Egham, a small town just outside of London, and has played in punk-adjacent bands since the late 90s, releasing multiple records and traveling the affectionately named toilet circuits.

Dave, welcome to the show.

I'm a big fan of the podcast, so I'm excited to be here.

Even though you were in punk bands, today you want to talk about something a bit different, which is old VWs.

Indeed, yeah, I own a few old VWs and I think how I kind of got to where I am with those really starts at where I started with music and stuff so just to go backwards a bit in my kind of life I spent a lot of my late teens and kind of 20s being really kind of involved in the music scene so not only did I play music in bands I worked for a record shop in Kingston called Banquet Records and we had a label as well we put on shows and effectively like that whole kind of punk scene was my it was my life it was my kind of culture and as i say i played lots of parts in this and i enjoy being part of something i think that's the that's the thing i found throughout everything in my life i enjoy being part of a community and that's true of design systems it's true true of music and it's true of now vws and i think the thing with music was i got to a point in my kind of music life where a few changes in my life kind of happened and i went further into design and i tried to kind of I got a bit older and I stopped playing as many kind of gigs or traveling with music.

And I found that I really was missing that part of my life, that part of my life that made me think I was part of something again, because I was, I was looking at what I used to do from a distance.

I really, honestly don't know what your job is like at all, but I'm not really talking about you.

I'm just talking about anybody on kind of a design systems team.

If you're fighting for adoption, it just feels like, like extra stress that you maybe don't need kinda, 'cause you're like, "Dude, if I can't...

I'm, like, man- you know, it's my job's mandate to build and maintain the system so that others may benefit from it.

Like, it feels like that 'cause you're, like, working, you know.

I think there is, like, this...

You can build this ivory tower in design systems where, like, you're this, like-

Hmm