Solving the Design System Problem When Products Live for Decades

When David joined Siemens, he faced the situation of many specialized design systems, each tailored for highly complex industrial products with “very” long product lifecyles. In this talk, he will take you through the incredibly complex journey of creating one single Design Language for all Siemens products, and why Siemens decided to open source all design assets. He will give you insights, why it´s not a good idea to enforce only one tech stack, how his team handles legacy products that stay in market for decades, and why design systems break the moment acquisitions occur, unless the system is built to evolve. This is a rare look at design systems at a truly industrial scale.