Ben Callahan
President at SparkboxSparkbox was founded in 2009 with a mission to build a better web. As President, Ben has helped lead and grow the organization while they work alongside clients like Gap, The Oklahoma City Thunder, and Stanford University. He’s focused his energy most recently on developing a maturity model for design systems, articulating the anatomy of design systems, and chronicling his findings about workplace culture in the tech space. When not knee-deep in these explorations with others, Ben is a father, partner, poet, and home barista. His personal motto is, “Stay in learning mode” and this helps him to remember that every interaction is an opportunity to grow.
For the last five to ten years, systematic design and development practices have been growing and growing. It’s no wonder that, once we put a name on this snowball (hello, “design systems”), it only picked up speed. If you manage more than one site, if you support more than one brand, if you want to be more efficient or more consistent or more unified in your digital interface building approach—this is the workshop for you.
We’ll start with a breakdown of design system concepts, reframing how to think about them in a practical and approachable way (The Anatomy of a Design System):
- Where design systems live in an organization
- The four layers of a design system (concepts)
- The three parts of each layer (tangibles)
Then we’ll dig into the four major concepts covered by the Design System Maturity Model developed from years of work, interviews, and industry-wide surveys:
- The stages of design system maturity
- How a design system’s origin story impacts its path through maturity
- A framework for maturing in a healthy way
- A framework for maintaining stability
Finally, we’ll discuss how the culture of your organization will impact the way you approach creating a sustainable systematic design practice:
- What is organizational culture?
- How to establish culture
- How subcultures are impacted by overall org culture
- How all of this connects to your systematic design practice
Additionally, we’ll cover the delicate balance between flexibility and consistency. We’ll discuss an additive approachto maturing that will allow you to move from one stage to the next and keep your team and system in good health. And we’ll discuss strategies for you to assess your current stage and discover opportunities to fill in the gaps you might have missed along the way.
To be clear, we will NOT be writing code. We will NOT be opening Figma. This workshop is about the hard parts of design system work—the people, culture, politics, consensus-building, and change management parts. Design system work is often lonely, but there is a growing community of people just like you trying to solve these problems. If that’s what you need, join me for a discussion that will reframe the way you think about the people and the processes your design system was built to support.
Learning Objectives:
- A holistic understanding of the anatomy of design systems
- An overview of the various ways a system can mature
- An understanding of the impact org culture has on a systems subculture
If you feel like you’re swimming upstream with your design system, it’s likely the result of a cultural problem—not a technical one. It may be time for you to look at your design system from a different perspective.
In this session, Ben Callahan will show you how design systems and company culture are inextricably linked. We'll examine how a deeper understanding of each is necessary to get you where you want to go, including:
- An exploration of four types of organizational culture
- An understanding of design systems as a bonafide subculture within an organization
- A discussion of how misalignment between design system culture and organizational culture can create major problems
- An explanation of the two most dominant design system subcultures—collaborative and controlling and how each—while viable—presents its own unique challenges
In this session you will learn the importance of cultural alignment so that you can achieve the goals for your design system faster. You will also be able to avoid past pitfalls thanks to a greater recognition of your newfound understanding of the importance culture plays in a systematic design practice.