A day at St George’s Hall: Design System Day 2024

I recently had the opportunity to attend this year’s Design System Day at the stunning neoclassical gem of St George’s Hall in Liverpool.

Organised by GOV.UK’s Design System team, this annual event has grown out of the first online event in 2021 and brings together user-centred professionals who are committed to ensuring the quality and consistency of GOV.UK’s content and services – as well as a few hangers-on (like me!) who frequently work closely with UK public sector organisations.

Since winning the Design Museum’s ‘Design of the Year’ award back in 2013,  GOV.UK has built on this and continues to manage and develop its ‘design system’: a toolkit of styles, components and patterns that make GOV.UK easy to use, accessible to all and faster to deliver.

The theme for this year was ‘Unsung Heroes’ and I was surprised by the wide range of topics and perspectives covered. I expected the event to focus on the technical side - ‘the how’ - of design systems, but instead, it was more focused on ‘the why’ and ‘what next’, which gave the day a positive, future-focused feeling.

Inside St George's Hall for the presentation

Digital Ethics and Japan’s ‘design allergies’

After an introductory keynote by Greg Macoy of Liverpool-based Matchstick Creative which set the scene for ethical and sustainable digital business practices via alignment with the UN’s sustainability goals and NHS Core20Plus5, Chikako Masuda (who’d travelled from Tokyo to speak) explained how she’s addressed ‘design allergies’ in the Government of Japan.

By ‘design allergies’ Chikako clarified, she means embedded civil service attitudes and misconceptions about how design can and is being used to solve complex problems, improve public services, and break down barriers.

Using aspects of GOV.UK methods mixed in with their own team’s ‘kindergarten workshops’ to educate and motivate staff into creative problem solving, Chikako and the Japanese ‘digital agency’ team were able to successfully improve and add value to many central and departmental services, as well as growing the community from 350 to over 1000 in the space of 3 years.

I’ve always thought of Japan as being at the ‘bleeding edge’ of digital so it was quite reassuring to hear that governments and service providers there face many of the same challenges we have in the United Kingdom and also work towards change and transformation.

The morning session ended with a panel discussion around the present and future of content design which touched on some of the issues and considerations created when data such as personal history starts being displayed as content, and how to plan and design this type of sensitive content mindfully and ethically.

Design systems: measuring & scaling

Following a ‘rock, paper, scissors’ energiser (I lost, very quickly), the afternoon session kicked off with Duncan MacGruer from Scottish Government sharing his experiences of measuring the performance of services that utilise their own design system.

Measuring performance of UX and interactions is something we’re increasingly focused on at PDMS, so I found this really relevant. From our own work updating and joining up legacy systems I could also really relate to Duncan’s point about complex systems that have evolved in a disjointed way and the challenges of trying to create a smooth user experience when a task relies on a number of disparate data sources and owners.

Design systems can really help with that kind of thing by providing consistency at the front end, regardless of data sources.

We then heard a dual narrative about how design systems can work for organisations large and small.  The large was presented by Michael Palmer, a product designer (and self confessed ‘Ken’) at The Beeb, while the small startup story was told by Alessandra Balliana, Creative and Product Design Lead at GoBubble.

While the differences between organising and running a design system at different sizes organisations were pretty clear (timescales, people, role specificity) there were surprising commonalities too – my key takeaway was that the crucial ingredients in design systems of any size are team culture and effective communication – in many cases the technology and design will to some extent take care of itself, provided the people are on board with clear communications, an established cadence and a proactive mindset.

Sustainability of technology systems, AI and Cloud Computing

Rounding off Design System Day 2024, we heard compelling evidence from DWP’s Ishmael Burdeau about the impact of technology on climate change and our carbon future.

Some of Ishmael’s numbers were pretty hardhitting, including the assertion that internet technology produces more carbon than aviation and that 321 Chat GPT queries equivalently generates 1kg of carbon into the atmosphere.

Not to mention the enormous usage of water and carbon emissions for cooling server farms and dedicated power supplies where the local infrastructure can’t provide the high levels needed.

In calling for the publication of ‘Sustainability Statements’ (in a comparable way to accessibility statements) that verify an organisation’s commitment to carbon reduction, Ishmael echoed what Greg was getting at earlier in the day and touched on a cause that is absolutely critical for all of us all to address.

From the smallest website or electronic product to the largest digital services, cloud computing and AI, use of energy-intensive tools needs to be reconsidered against the value of the task being carried out.

This really gave me food for thought, especially in relation to our Island’s Unesco Biosphere Nation status and NetZero pledge. Between 2018 and 2022, Energy supply was the Isle of Man’s largest contributor to GGE, according to Government data: my big takeaway was that our powerful tech should be being used to solve big problems - like the Climate Emergency - and not contribute to emissions just to provide high volume (and often low value) consumer products.

It also reminded me that considering the environmental sustainability of what we do with technology, as well as the financial & social impact (and everything else!) is all part of ‘design thinking’.  I’m proud of the steps we’ve made so far at PDMS to improve our own carbon footprint, whilst continuing to design efficient digital transformation.

Speaking of efficiency, thank you GOV.UK organisers for hosting such a seamless day, and for opening it up to non-public sector professionals. I’m very much looking forward to future DSDs.

A statue inside St George's Hall for Design System Day