I originally planned on writing these once a week—as evident from the date of this post, I did not achieve this goal. Over the past few weeks, I waded into what I thought was a shallow pool of conversation, and found myself diving into a incredibly vast and deep ocean of already existing literature.
Admittedly, my original approach was naïve, and my prior knowledge was incredibly limited. After receiving a push in the right direction from a designer who has been thinking in this space, I've come across a treasure trove of writing that has largely been unapplied in modern product design methodologies, and will be writing on my findings as I come to understand the larger body of existing research in this area.
In the meantime, here are two great essays I've found that approach manifesting intent from different angles:
Where We Can Go by Daniel Eden
If the design system itself is the tool, then partners and product teams would directly manipulate the comprising parts of the system, and the outputs and platforms become what they ought to be—implementation details.
Daniel looks at how we use design systems, and how we can deliver higher quality products when we approach design systems as tools themselves. The essay is a great distillation of the organizational hurdles facing design systems, and the possibilities for embedding intent into our products given a properly implemented design system.
Declarative Design Tools by Jon Gold
With our current tools we’re telling the computer how to design the vision we have in our head...in our future tools we will tell our computers what we want to see, and let them figure out how to move elements around to get there.
Three years ago, Jon wrote this essay to re-imagine how we could introduce declarative paradigms into visual design. By approaching design as a set of intentions—which can be rendered by software in the case for visual design—we can spend more time understanding our intents and processes, and less on representing output. Although his investigation is around visual design, much of this thought can actually be applied to product design.
Stay tuned for more updates!