If it’s something designers can pull from and contribute to, discuss, challenge, alter, and depart from, then what you have is functioning more like a language and a library, which is hopefully what you want, and it’s probably helping.

If it’s absolutely overseen by a centralized few, and voices who dissent on any aspect are penalized for doing so, then what you have isn’t a design system. It’s absolutism. A blunt instrument for upholding an established order, and it’s holding you back. It may even be hurting everyone it reaches.

Let me ask you this. Does your design system feel like a prison sometimes?

Who holds the keys to that system?
Who or what controls it? A human or a machine?
Who put them in power?
Did they acquire and inherit the system, or did they build it themselves?
Whose views does the system reflect? Whose does it reject?

Are you allowed to challenge the system?
Does the system adapt to your challenges?

When people disagree with the system, can they speak up?
Are challengers vilified?

Who can contribute to it?

Is the system absolute?

If a system requires absolute conformity merely for the sake of consistency, without any consideration for exception or growth, is it really a good and rigorous system?

A system that cannot be questioned is intellectually closed.

A system can be rigid in implementation capability and still have intellectually open governance. Conversely, a technically flexible system can be governed by people who treat every difference as a defect.

Some might assume the system is correct and absolute without question. Is it though? Is the only way to uphold its so-called legitimacy through coercion of others rather than reason?

An unfortunate conversation might go something like the following:
“This design is wrong because it violates the system.”
“Why is the system right?”
“Because the system is the way it is and designs that do not fit it are wrong.”

Once “because the system says so” becomes a sufficient explanation, it stops functioning as accumulated knowledge and becomes a mechanism for enforcing conformity.

“There’s a big difference between having smart, reusable patterns at your disposal and creating a dictatorial culture designed to enforce conformity and swat down anyone coloring outside the lines.”
— Brad Frost, “Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization” (2020)

Is the system preserving formal consistency at the expense of conceptual consistency? Is consistency even the right objective?

Everything may look more alike, but the relationship between meaning and expression becomes less legible.

An exception can sometimes preserve the deeper logic of a system better than obedience to its surface rules.

A mature and effective system has to be able to accommodate something that contradicts its existing rules, learn from it, and potentially alter itself, unless the system owners genuinely believe the system cannot be improved.

Instead of conforming to aspects of systems that lead to worse results, there should be improvement to the system.

There is a threshold and stringent style of system governance that, were it to play out in civic public settings, would likely warrant protest.

Alternatives to systems: languages and nature. Designing a language, designing the nature of something.