There is something comforting about a good system. It offers rules. Boundaries. The sense that if you follow it closely enough, you will end up somewhere solid, somewhere predictable.
In product design, that often materializes as things like a double diamond, human-centered frameworks, or a well-tuned design system. These are good tools. They save time, reduce chaos, and help teams scale. But they also carry a quiet risk.
They can make you feel like the thinking is finished.
A few years back, I shared Natasha Jen’s talk Design Thinking is Bullshit with my team. On the surface, it is a critique of post-it-note culture and the belief that frameworks alone can replace real judgment. But the deeper point she makes is easy to miss.
Design is not a fixed process. It is a judgment call made in motion.
That judgment… the kind you cannot template… is where most systems stop being helpful. And where design actually begins.
I've been on teams that executed perfectly inside a known system, only to miss the problem entirely. I have done it myself too… followed every step, checked every box, and still ended up with something that looked right but did not land. Systems can produce consistency, but not always whats needed.
Its not that systems are broken. The illusion is that they are complete. They are not. The work that matters almost always lives just beyond the edges. I think Natasha Jen was not only criticizing design thinking. She was also pointing to something deeper.
Process cannot account for context. No matter how refined your structure is, you still have to know when to look up.
That moment when you lift your head, when you step out of the pattern and look at what is actually happening, is where judgment starts to form. It is where experience, instinct, and presence take over from process. And that is the part of design that cannot be diagrammed.
At this year’s D&AD conference, Leland Maschmeyer pushed an idea that has stuck with me. He suggested that designers might be wise to spend less time showcasing what they made and more time explaining what it did… what it enabled.
That framing feels right.
It shifts the focus from form to function over time. Not the portfolio piece, but the behavior of the system once it is real.
That shift matters. Because the truth is, most people do not care how elegant something looks if it does not hold up under pressure. They care about whether it works. Whether it helps. Whether it moves something forward.
In that sense, performance is a kind of accountability. You are not just shipping something clean. You are standing behind how it behaves once it is out in the world.
Decades ago, Herbert Simon said:
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
He was not talking about pixels. He was talking about systems. About responsibility. When you see it through that lens, the job changes.
Craft and taste still matter, but they are not enough. You have to understand how your decisions ripple across a product, a platform, an organization. And you have to be able to explain that clearly.
That does not mean the aesthetic layer disappears. It earns its place when it reinforces the larger structure.
Performance and presentation are not in conflict. But one has to lead.
Design systems help with that. At their best, they embed tested decisions across an entire surface. But again, the system is only the beginning. Knowing when to follow it, when to stretch it, and when to step outside it…that is what separates execution from authorship.
Because in the end, it’s not about how neatly the system was applied. It’s about whether it held up when it counted.
To be continued in…
Field Note — Grid + Bauhaus
