The future of design systems is decentralized

Lessons from nature and technology

Imagine a design system that evolves organically, free from the constraints of centralized control. A system where updates and patterns emerge naturally from its users, where collaboration isn’t just encouraged but woven into its fundamental architecture. This isn’t just about democratizing design decisions — it’s about creating systems that grow and adapt as naturally as the organizations they serve.

The challenges that design systems aim to solve — cohesion, efficiency, and quality — aren’t unique to our field. Other domains, from natural systems like ant colonies to technological innovations like blockchain networks, have tackled similar problems through innovative approaches to decentralization. These systems have demonstrated how to build networks that are transparent, collaborative, and community-driven. Their methods of aligning participants around shared goals offer valuable lessons for reimagining how design systems operate. Their methods of aligning participants around shared goals offer valuable lessons for reimagining how design systems operate.

While decentralization in design systems isn’t a new concept, previous attempts have often fallen short due to flawed implementation and insufficient support. This exploration draws inspiration from decentralized networks to propose practical strategies for building more adaptable, inclusive, and scalable design systems — ones that truly serve the needs of both their users and the broader organization.

The challenge of centralization

Design Systems teams often operate as centralized units tasked with making product teams faster while ensuring quality and cohesion across experiences. While these responsibilities naturally gravitate towards centralization, and we measure success accordingly, we should ask ourselves: aren’t efficiency, quality, and cohesion actually shared responsibilities across all product team members — from designers to PMs to engineers?

The typical Design Systems story might sound familiar: a dedicated team develops foundational elements and primitives — colors, typography, icons — along with core components like buttons, inputs, and modals. They create usage guidelines, and product teams use these building blocks to craft user experiences.

This model works initially, but products and user needs aren’t static — they continuously evolve. Product designers, being closer to end users than Systems designers, frequently encounter scenarios where existing components or guidelines don’t quite fit new requirements. In these moments, designers face three uncomfortable options:

1. Follow the design system strictly, potentially delivering a suboptimal user experience
2. Wait for guidance from the Design Systems team, often delaying project timelines
3. Create custom solutions outside the system to meet immediate user needs

The third option usually wins — it’s faster and addresses immediate needs. But this choice, multiplied across teams and projects, creates problems. The centralized governance model, while intended to maintain quality, often slows the system’s ability to adapt. Even minor updates require multiple approvals, compete with other priorities, and face intense scrutiny to justify ROI and maintain consistency.

This slow pace of change frustrates product teams, dampens innovation, and ultimately discourages system adoption. The result? Fragmented user experiences and accumulated design debt that typically only gets addressed during major redesigns — essentially a forced reset of the system.

Ironically, centralization in large organizations often undermines the core goals of Design Systems — instead of increasing efficiency, quality, and cohesion, it can hinder them.

The decentralization spectrum

In her book ‘Thinking in Systems’, Donella Meadows emphasizes that a system’s outcomes — good or bad — are primarily shaped by its structural design, not external factors. For Design Systems, this insight suggests we should focus as much on organizational structure and design as we do on defining color tokens or button variants.

The balance between centralization and decentralization isn’t a binary choice — it’s a spectrum that shifts with network scale and complexity. Each organization must find its optimal position along this continuum based on its unique needs and challenges.

In smaller teams, centralization often proves effective. Decision-making is swift, feedback loops remain tight, and teams maintain their agility. However, as networks grow, decentralization becomes not just beneficial but necessary. Large-scale centralized governance inevitably creates bottlenecks, slows decision-making, and struggles with scalability. This challenge becomes particularly acute in organizations with multiple product lines, diverse user needs, and teams spread across different time zones and contexts.

Design Systems can follow a similar evolution. Starting with centralization provides the necessary foundation — establishing core principles, shared vocabulary, and baseline components. But successful growth requires a gradual shift toward decentralization through well-defined roles, clear protocols, and robust collaboration mechanisms. Yet many Design Systems teams overlook this crucial transition, constrained by concerns about maintaining quality and consistency or limited by ineffective funding models. This hesitation leads to missed opportunities to build more scalable and resilient systems.

The key lies not in abandoning centralized control entirely, but in thoughtfully redistributing responsibility and decision-making power across the network.

What makes a great decentralized system?

A decentralized system’s strength lies in its resilience. By distributing decision-making and action across a network, it eliminates single points of failure that often plague centralized structures. However, this resilience doesn’t emerge automatically — it must be carefully architected through thoughtful rules, clear processes, and aligned incentives.

Both nature and technology offer compelling examples of successful decentralization. Ant colonies make complex decisions, such as choosing a new nest location, through a democratic process of independent exploration and collective consensus-building. Their scouts investigate options, evaluate against criteria, and use pheromone trails to “vote” for suitable sites. Without central control, colonies consistently make optimal choices through clear protocols and distributed intelligence.

For design systems to achieve similar success, they need to establish clear foundations for how participants interact, make decisions, and stay accountable. Essentially, they must address three fundamental questions:

1. How do participants interact? The system needs clear, efficient channels for collaboration and knowledge sharing.
2. How are decisions made? Effective consensus protocols must balance speed with quality.
3. How are incentives structured? The system should encourage meaningful contributions while maintaining accountability.

Furthermore, looking at successful decentralized networks, from blockchain projects to natural systems, we can identify four essential characteristics that most of them share:

1. Clear incentives — contributions must have visible impact and recognition. In design systems, this might mean highlighting widely-adopted patterns or celebrating improvements that measurably enhance user experience.
2. Distributed expertise — different decisions require different types of knowledge. The system should delegate specialized decisions, like accessibility or motion design, to subject matter experts while maintaining inclusive participation.
3. Transparent processes — trust grows from transparency, with every decision, discussion, and change being traceable and understood by the community.
4. Communal ownership — long-term success depends on participants feeling genuine ownership of the system through shared governance and collective decision-making.

The challenges of decentralization

Like any system design, decentralization isn’t without its drawbacks. Even when teams successfully establish robust protocols and scalable networks, they face inherent tensions. The most significant is the trilemma between speed, scalability, and decentralization — improving any one aspect often requires compromising another.

Some networks have found creative ways to address these challenges. One approach involves breaking the system into smaller, semi-autonomous units where trade-offs can be managed more effectively. Another strategy employs layered architectures, as demonstrated by Ethereum’s two-layer model: a foundational layer maintaining core standards and consensus, with a second layer enabling flexibility and scalability for specific needs.

This layered approach offers a particularly relevant blueprint for design systems. Rather than attempting complete decentralization, it suggests thoughtfully distributing control where it makes sense while maintaining strong core principles. The goal isn’t to decentralize everything, but to find the right balance between centralized stability and decentralized innovation.

Suggested design

Drawing from the two-layer model, we can reimagine how design systems operate. Layer 1 serves as the foundation — the core design system with its style guides, UI kits, and usage guidelines. This layer, maintained by a central team, provides the stability and clarity essential for any scalable system.

The magic happens in Layer 2, where decentralization takes root. Here, Design Systems team members transform from gatekeepers into delegates embedded within product teams. These delegates don’t just relay information — they become bridges, facilitating dialogue between teams and ensuring the core system evolves with real-world needs.

This shift fundamentally changes the role of the Design Systems team. Rather than acting as creators and enforcers, they become facilitators and connectors. They guide the community toward consensus without dictating solutions. Decisions emerge from collective experience and needs, with the Design Systems team orchestrating the process rather than controlling it. Creation and maintenance of assets (components, patterns, tokens, etc.) happen communally.

In this model, the true measure of success shifts. The Design Systems team’s focus moves from policing outcomes to nurturing the health of the network itself. Their primary concern becomes the quality of connections and exchanges between teams, ensuring the right voices are heard and the right conversations happen. They maintain the protocols that enable effective collaboration, stepping back from prescribing specific solutions.

Like a well-functioning ecosystem, the system becomes self-sustaining — not through rigid control, but through healthy interaction patterns and clear protocols that enable organic growth and adaptation.

Pragmatic realism

As our organizations grow and user needs evolve, we face a choice: continue with centralized models that create bottlenecks, or evolve toward systems that scale more naturally with our teams.

The solution isn’t radical decentralization, but rather thoughtful evolution towards it. Of course, this is easier said than done. However, by building strong foundations and clear protocols, we can create systems that maintain quality while enabling teams to move at the speed of user needs.

This shift requires us to rethink our role — from gatekeepers to facilitators, from rule-makers to community builders. The future of design systems isn’t in perfecting our components or creating amazing documentation. Instead, it lies in creating environments where teams can effectively solve user problems together, guided by shared principles and protocols rather than rigid rules.

The first step is acknowledging that our current approach isn’t scaling with our needs. The next is having the courage to evolve it.

Stay safe,

Oscar.