How we think about design systems for the new orchestration era.
This new thing is really a new thing. The emergence of AI has forced the hand of all disciplines within product groups. So much that came before must now be thrown away. Its early and so much will change, but here is look at some of our thinking around design systems and their constituent parts.
Introduction
The MiM Design System is aimed at capturing a cognitive evolution in how we interact with machines in the new generative and inference anchored world. The system aims to combine a traditional and enduring semantic UI approach with a cognitive layer that captures the various reasoning states of the model as the user progresses through the design phase of the Application's journey. (not available in version 1 on the app store).
The design system contemplates 3 distinct phases of completion that the user navigates through in the early product journey interations. Combined i refer to them as Design Orchestration (DO). Design orchestration can be defined as:
- Inputs: prompts and inputs provided by the user that tell the DO what kind of meaning the user is expressing. These are also referred to as Meaning Dimensions.
- Functions: The cognitive semantics that MiM employs to apply reasoning to the inference
- Outputs: The creative directions, layouts, product mockups, or suggestions and such that MiM returns after processing.
Combined, These steps represent departures from deterministic based journeys, and introduce an entirely new paradigm. From a design perspective, being able to visually accommodate or capture this new inference > response step is design frontier territory!
In this post, I explain the beginnings of how this impacts our core components - specifically our Palettes.
First, the more traditional Palette.
Second, and also somewhat traditional, the Semantic palette:
Third, and this is where it gets a touch tricky, the Cognitive Palette:
Finally - the colors that capture new semantics.
Its too early to say whether this goes anywhere close to visually supporting a user's journey, and we likely wont know for several versions and many thousands of users, but its exciting stuff as long as you are able to keep a lid on the distracting nature of new toys!
