On Theme: Design Systems in Depth

Creativity and design system leadership in the age of AI, with Natalya Shelburne — #17

• Elyse Holladay • Season 1 • Episode 17

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Chat, this is the last episode of season one! Thank you for listening and supporting the show! There's no better way to wrap up, IMO, than an optimistic and curious exploration of what it means to be a creative human in an increasingly technological world.

So to wrap up season one, Natalya Shelburne joins me to explore how design leaders can cultivate creativity in an era of rapid technological and organizational change. Drawing from her degree and research in creativity, Natalya shares insights on fostering innovation, overcoming fear-driven management styles, and why embracing artistic thinking is essential for teams navigating the age of AI. She explains the importance of creating safe environments to unlock creative potential and why outdated corporate structures simply can't compete. Plus, flow state, goats, expansive thinking, and hobbies. 


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🎨🎟️ Into Design Systems is May 25-28
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Into Design Systems is back with their annual virtual conference, May 28-30, 2025. Get your ticket now for three days of practical, hands on sessions showing the what, why, and how of design systems. This year, the conference is focused on developer handoff, accessibility, multi brand theming, and governance. You'll get hands on knowledge you can put to use at work immediately, files and resources to take away, and hear from very well known industry speakers. 

Natalya:

And if people feel safe, they will be able to access their creativity. Time scarce people who feel scared will not be able to innovate. And I think that's the biggest thing that I see, is just like, if you're in a place where people are working a very old fashioned way, where you know, it's very top down and heavy and that's— you're not gonna be able to compete, in the age of AI. Because groups of creative people are gonna be able to have much wider impact with the tools that are available to them. So you wanna innovate. Hire artists and encourage, grow, and nurture human creativity, and let go some of those old corporate ways of working. Now, easier said than done! But I think for anybody who's listening who's in leadership, I think it's a really good time to examine how you personally lead, and how you are working with people, given the fact that it is a massive time of uncertainty. And you're asking people to innovate in a brand new space, while they're feeling all of this anxiety.

Elyse:

This is On Theme, Design Systems in Depth, and I'm Elyse Holladay. Together, we'll be exploring how successful design systems get built, maintained, and deliver impact. Design systems is due for a major reinvention moment, and I want to share what's working from design system practitioners out there forging the way. As you listen, text the show with your thoughts, aha moments, and questions by clicking the text link in the show notes. Before we begin, a quick thank you and word from our generous sponsor, Into Design Systems. Into Design Systems is back with their annual virtual conference, May 28 30, 2025. Visit intodesignsystems. com slash ontheme to get your ticket to three days of practical, hands on sessions showing the what, why, and how of design systems. This year, the conference is focused on developer handoff, accessibility, multi brand theming, and governance. You'll get hands on knowledge you can put to use at work immediately, files and resources to take away, and hear from very well known industry speakers. Get your ticket at intodesignsystems. com slash on theme, and I'll see you at the conference in May. All right, let's dive into the show. I'm so excited to welcome Natalya Shelburne to the podcast today. She is a designer, developer, and educator leading the Primer Design System at GitHub. She has a background in Psychology, Studio Art, and relevant to today's topic, Creativity Research. Previously, she worked at the New York Times, as a frontend developer and as an instructor at Harvard Extension School. She's a speaker and an author, and she explores creativity and technology in her latest talk, Channeling Chaos, the Role of the Artist in the Age of AI. Natalya, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Natalya:

So excited to be here.

Elyse:

So, yes. I did say the words AI, it had to be done. We had to have an episode on AI. I know you can't escape it anywhere, but AI tools are here, and they are not going away. And Natalya, your focus lately has been on how to approach design leadership in the age of AI. Can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by that?

Natalya:

This is gonna be a very long-winded question. You did mention that I used to teach, so at the risk of sounding like a professor, I'd like to give you a little history here.

Elyse:

We love it.

Natalya:

I got my master's in creativity and talent development, which, at first, I thought like, well, you can't teach that, you're born with creativity like me, an artist, of course! But the delightful truth is that there's a lot of research and there are a lot of studies about, what is creativity, what are the conditions for creativity, and how do we foster that? And specifically in terms of design leadership, I am so lucky, I have the greatest team in the world, the Primer design team at GitHub right now, who are just some of the greatest talents, and they're working in a time of rapid technological change and innovation. And there is no greater time to have artists on your team than now. How does this tie to AI? Because historically— I said this was gonna be a professor lecture!— historically, artists have been the ones who have shaped how a technological disruption integrates into society. There's so many historical examples of it. Technology and the arts have not been separate. They have been deeply intertwined. And the people in society who decide how things are going to change, when things are going to change, have been artists. So to me, this is a very cool place to be and personally, just with my background in the arts, deeply, deeply exciting.

Elyse:

I think so too, because a big disruption, a big moment of upheaval, is also a moment of opportunity. It can be very scary; change and opportunity can be uncertain, it can be frightening, but there's always opportunity there. And I think it's very easy for us to look at all the things that are changing around us, and be very afraid, because things are changing. I think it's so cool to flip that on its head and be like, okay, what does this actually do? There may be negative effects, but there's also room to make positive effects, and to adapt and to change, and that's, one of the things that, like my soapbox that I've been on— I talked about this in my Clarity talk in 2017, was like— our tools keep changing. Our tools have been changing so rapidly. I don't know, it's like easy to forget, but think about in the last 20 years, like we had dot-com bubble, we had like HTML and CSS, now we have React, we have the iPhone, we have all of this technological change. That's not slowing down. How do we approach that with less fear and more creativity, I guess, more optimism? How do you think about approaching that as an artist, but also as, somebody who works in tech, which can be often seen as not a creative field or not an artistic field.

Natalya:

Totally. That's why I was in design— I mean like traditional design, before I joined tech— was as a kid, I wanted to— I loved computers, I wanted to go into tech. And what I heard from very well-meaning grownups was that, no, but you're creative. Go into the actual fine arts world, because you're creative, the computer is not where the creativity is. Fortunately, I was a menace, and I did not listen for very long, and I found my way, via the scenic route, to tech. But we're, I think it's really cool that your podcast has been going down like a history of design systems, and we've mentioned all the tooling, like Brad Frost was saying like, Handlebars and Mustache, was this peak millennial thing. Yeah, the names we came up were wacky. But what were those tools? Those tools were abstractions for collaboration. It was people saying, this is hard and I want it better, not just for me, but everybody else in my community as well. And I find that to be so inspirational. Still. I get so nerdy about it. My favorite thing about design systems isn't the button we've redesigned a million times, it's the community. That we've built along the way. Like, design systems aren't the components. What if they're the friends we've made along the way?

Elyse:

I'm gonna make that the tagline for season two of the podcast.

Natalya:

Things are changing, they're always changing, and now they're changing even faster. Now the rate of change is accelerating beyond human ability to keep up. What do we do? We have to meet the moment. And just to go back to the artist example, when cameras hit the scene, portrait painters were real mad. They were super upset, and they weren't mad that a new technology got invented. It's that suddenly nobody needed to sit for a portrait and their livelihood did go away. But it also ushered in a new era of expression, and new art styles, and film. And so if you think about it, if you're sitting there as a despondent portrait painter thinking, that's it, there goes my entire livelihood, you can't picture the Oscars. Right? You have no idea that's coming, that film is gonna be a whole industry. I'm not trying to say like toxic positivity, like you don't know what's happening next, but you don't know what's happening next. So, as much as you wanna project the negative, you should also realize, like you, you could spend equal energy on projecting what's possible. And the last thing I'll say is this, for anybody listening who is afraid, please keep in mind that there are people standing by, ready to monetize the fact that you are afraid right now, by selling you the peace and calm of, we know what's happening and for the low, low price of signing up for our program, we'll keep you safe.

Elyse:

That's always, there's always somebody who's willing to capitalize on, on uncertainty and on fear. But, I don't wanna harp on this too much, but I do wanna talk about it for just a second. One of the things that seems really different to me personally, is that in the, you know, ZIRP, zero interest rate decade, so this 2008-9, post recession to 2020 or so, in a lot of ways that decade felt quite economically stable, compared to what we are feeling now, where the change, the technological change, feels a lot less maybe in our control, or a lot more economically unstable for businesses, for our jobs, for the future of our roles. And so this fear of tools feels really different to me. Like I remember when, like I was a CSS Person, professionally, and I remember when React came along and me and all these other CSS people were like, you're taking my job.

Natalya:

I remember the damage that the anti-CSS rhetoric did at the dawn of the React age, and then how much job security us CSS people had, taking the CSS and putting it into the JS and then taking it back out again, then putting it back in.

Elyse:

It turns we're still writing CSS. We're just doing it in a different way. Like I still have a job. I think about the best software engineers out there right now, are probably the people who are like in their fifties or sixties, like if they're building for the web now, they have learned like 85 languages. Like they have changed and adapt and you get so much better at pattern matching. And we had to do that, we did that in that zero interest rate decade, when our tools changed a whole bunch, and our design tools have changed a whole bunch, but it felt a little more stable then, and this feels like a sea change. So, what would you say to people who are really afraid for their jobs?

Natalya:

Yeah. First of all it's, it's pattern matching and trying to predict the doom and gloom. I think we've rarely been right, but what we have had is a gut sense of, something is changing, something needs to be done. A lot of what's changing is that the tools are, I feel like they're getting so much more abstracted, and so much more complex, that they seem like you have to specialize in order to be competitive. Whereas before you could be like, I got a style sheet and an index.html, there are companies building like this and I'm good to go. Whereas now you have to learn entire ecosystems and entire layers of abstraction before you can do your first anything. So one of the things that I always encourage, especially in leading teams of multidisciplinary people, is to remind them to hold their own ruler, and to keep their judgment really close. Because it's very easy to put what is next, or what is good, outside of yourself. And all of a sudden you get lost, and you realize I, I stopped trusting the little voice inside of me that says, you know what, my judgment's good. And then you follow, the next trend, the next trend, and the next trend, and you could get really good at something you don't even wanna be good at. But at the same time, what we're seeing is the increase in this, the increase in anxiety around, can I pay for my house? Are eggs gonna get even more expensive? Is my job still necessary? What skills do I need to learn? The path seems a lot less straightforward than it did before.

Elyse:

Well, and it was easy to get another job. Because if you didn't like what your company was doing, we were in a really economically sound time for technology, right? Where companies had lots of money, there was a lot of investment money, and you're like, yeah, I'm just gonna hop over here and like I can just YOLO, quit, and go get a, a new job. The fear, it is economic, it is political, all these things that are around us going, am I gonna be safe? Am I gonna be able to keep my family safe? And those are all very, very legitimate. And I don't wanna dismiss any of that. I also wanna bring it back to, what are we gonna do, what can we actually do, how do we actually engage with this? Because of course, we're gonna worry about our future and our stability and our safety. But we also can't just bury our head in the sand and pretend that it's not gonna happen and pretend that this change is not here, that AI tools are maybe just mystically gonna go away one day and that nothing's gonna change. Change is always occurring around us. And so I hope that we can think a little bit about, we move forward with this, in a way that feels optimistic? But I wanna back up to something that you said a few minutes ago about what creativity means. I love that you said, that building these tools, like building these design system tools, building Handlebars, React, building CSS architectures, building Figma, like creating all of these tools were actually acts of creativity. You hear very often, you know, about creativity in tech and creativity in design systems, like, oh, the design system stifles creativity, or, oh, UI design is not about creativity, it's form over function, like whatever, whatever. What does creativity even mean to you? Like, how would you even define creativity broadly? And then specifically, how do you think about creativity in the scope of tech or design systems?

Natalya:

Super favorite question, honestly. There's so many different ways of defining creativity, and I don't aspire to, to say, this is the one But one definition that I really liked in my graduate studies was, it's an having an original idea of value. And that's more fuzzy words. What is an original idea? What is value? And then if you start digging in, there's big C creativity, that's like an idea that nobody's ever had before. And there's little C creativity where it's like, I had the spark and the brilliant moment, and I go online and it's been done, there's a framework for it ready to go. I think design systems are totally one of those things that we all converged on this inevitable solution. There's gotta be a better way instead of doing this a million times over and over. So creativity, the best way I can sum it up for you in this very short time that we have here, is it's a practice. It is a muscle we can flex. It is a practice that needs the conditions around you to be met. And there are things that nurture your creativity and there are things that s squander it, and honestly extinguish it. And a lot of the things we do as managers really kill creativity. A lot. A lot of things we do in a workplace are not good for creativity. And a lot of times you'll see that maybe some of your best ideas are not in front of the computer. They're while you're taking a hike or doing something else entirely. So, what is creativity? A million different definitions, but I would just say creativity is a practice, and it is an idea of value.

Elyse:

I love that because I think we think about creativity sometimes in this very flat way, of like, art, drawing, you know, artistic and creative being condensed down into the same thing. And I love the idea of creativity as problem solving, or ideating, or that, that spark, that can be expressed in all kinds of different ways. It's not necessarily an artistic way.

Natalya:

As a former design and art teacher, the arts do not have dibs on creativity, but the arts did a really good job convincing you that is the only place you can have creativity. No domain has ownership of creativity. Creativity can exist in any domain.

Elyse:

I love what you said a second ago about creativity being away from the computer screen. We are always in front of our computer screen. That is how we are designing, that is how we are developing, we're on Zoom, we're having meetings, we're talking about solutions for our users, and we're trying to come up with creative ideas to— I am using the word creative there in the generative sense, right? Like, how do we actually create or build or make something for the person we're making it for, that doesn't just feel recycled. I read a book, I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but I'll put it in the show notes about our expansive brains, and the ways that the tools we use actually help our thinking, or constrain our thinking. And there was a chapter where the author was talking about literally like being in a big room with a big whiteboard, or drawing on a teeny tiny pad, or being on your phone or being on a big monitor. We literally can think more when we have this expansion of surface to, to think into. We have better ideas when we're walking, when we're moving, when we're in nature, all these things that our brain really likes in terms of creativity. And I'm actually really excited for some of the potential futures I see with AI tools. Like right now, they're all very chat based. It's a flat screen interface. But in my podcast episode with Dan Mall, he was saying, I think design systems are a transition. Design systems themselves are a phase where we're transitioning from one way of doing things with design and code, to a future way of doing things with design and code, that may not be, design is separate from code. What would it be like, if you can actually build something by gesturing, by speaking, by drawing, all these things that we kinda can't do right now or can't conceptualize right now. That to me is really interesting, because I wonder how it's going to expand our human brain capacity, for having big ideas, when we aren't constrained by the Figma surface, or the notepad, or the code editor. How do you think about creativity in these expansive ways, and what are some ways that we can bring some of that creativity in now, even though we are constrained to this immediate surface?

Natalya:

I think that's an amazing question, and I think about that exact thing all the time. And I think this is where my focus on augmenting human creativity, that's the next chapter of my creative career, is focusing deeply on human creativity. What happens when you don't need a button? Does AI need my button in the style guide? No, but so, what am I augmenting here? What patterns am I trying to abstract out? For me, a design system, I'm growing my own personal definition of it. It is a reflection of what we designed as an organization. I mean, we're a reflection of how an organization designs, right? We collect, we bottle the magic from everybody, and we say, here you go, one magic. Here are the Legos or whatever it is, like, we're just distributors of the magic that happens all around us. Moving forward, it's how can we provide more guidance, and provide more of this creative thinking for the ecosystem around us. We are zoomed out. We see the whole organization, and we are considering all use cases at once. Whereas platform and feature teams might be thinking about their specific thing. So what are we gonna be doing with design systems? Great questions. We are figuring this out right now. But if we ask the question underneath that, is, what are we designing? What are we creating and how do we help people create? I feel that's what got us in the game in the first place, is, I wanna make cooler things than the same button 80 times. We are still trying to create a great user experience for the designers doing the work, and caring for the design user experience, the engineer user experience. Because the arts don't have dibs on creativity, and I know any domain can be creative, I have seen the most creative people who are engineers, front end, back end. I've seen some of those creative people who are product folks, who are designers, whatever discipline they're in. I've seen amazing minds freed up from the repetitive, whatever tool they're in, whether it's slicing up things in Photoshop, which, or mired in a million style sheets, trying to figure out where are these styles coming from, you know?

Elyse:

Arguing with TypeScript. For me it's writing freaking type interfaces. I'm just like, come on, like, just, just understand, like be in my brain. You know what it's supposed to be, come on computer. I'm ready for that to not do that anymore.

Natalya:

So my question becomes, what does it mean to augment human creativity, and how do we do that best? It is very open right now. And for me, my, my training falls back to the arts world, of working with artists and seeing what does it mean to create, to create ideas with value. But it also goes back to the psychology world because the legacy system we're currently working with is human brains. What is human creativity? How do we remember things? How do we accomplish things? How do we feel good about accomplishing things? How does our attention work? I mean, think about what we're gonna have to do in the future when we have an infinite attention scrolling machine just made for you. What are those tools gonna do to us? What is it gonna mean?

Elyse:

I kind of feel like we're already there. The infinite scroll algorithm is already, it's already shaping us.

Natalya:

It's also shaping kids brains, which is one of my favorite things to think about. What are the brain scans showing of children who grew up with a whole lot of screen time? How's their attention span doing? And what does it mean to to grow up from a very early age, always being able to find out the answer, or never being bored, and never having to wonder Just questions I'm asking, and I'm not really sure what those answers are, but—

Elyse:

I don't think it's all gonna be bad, you know. I think there's a lot of fear and a lot of fear mongering'cause it's easy to see the really negative things. You read about oh, kids in school, they don't know how to do this basic problem solving, they don't know how to read. And I think that's true and that's scary. But we have to figure out how to adapt to teach those skills. When I went to school, it was about teaching facts to memorize. And it was actually outside of school where I learned things like problem solving and the multiple why's, like the Socratic method of investigation, getting into, how do I actually like untangle this problem? Or how do I investigate my own feelings about something? We didn't really get that in school in the U.S. And I dunno, maybe other countries have better school systems, but at least here, like, we didn't get that. And that's gonna have to change. Because if you can get the facts, and we're not even gonna go and talk about misinformation, but if you can get facts, right, you can have your calculator, you can look up some information, the things that you're gonna have to do to engage with the world are different. They're going to be around seeing patterns, around problem solving, around this broad bucket of creativity, right, of knowing what question to ask. And I'm, I don't even mean like prompt engineering, but like, knowing how to move the world around you through the tools that you have. Because it's not just facts or data, and I think a lot of us use LLMs right now as like fact machines. But I think the really interesting stuff is in abstraction— they are abstractions of tools for creation. So what is it that you're creating?

Natalya:

And creativity is a, is a practice, so how are you practicing creating? And so it's really cool that you said at the beginning, we used to focus on memorization. You know, the tools that we needed were outside of us, like, you just need access to information. Well, now we have access to everything. So now it's how we access the information. Better searching and better problem finding, not just problem solving. And what's gonna come next? What will it mean to always have a teacher with you? Because there is a theory called zone of proximal development. And there was this wonderful educational psychologist called Lev Vygotsky who said, there's this amount that you can learn, on your own this is what you're capable of. And then you expand that much broader, and here's what you're capable of with a teacher guiding you, with someone asking you guiding questions helping you reach just beyond what you're capable of. So I'm very curious about how AI is also gonna play out in education, when there's someone watching and assessing what your level of understanding is, and guiding you to the next question, to the next discovery, to the next bit of creative leap. Again, it goes back to human creativity: what are we capable of when we have tools that augment what our creativity is. And that's what I'd like to keep shaping. And that's what I'd like to be involved in the industry as far as I can, as far as it'll have me, to help augment creativity, to help the creative conditions, to allow creative people to keep making things without worrying about their jobs or if they're on the right path, but creating the conditions for them to trust their judgment and make the best work that they can. Because there's also, you know, there's an inverse world, where somebody says, what can these tools do to extract the most from people? To capture their attention the most and give us the most value out of these humans? I know which side I land on. I find investing human creativity to be the thing that fills my cup and the thing that I want to throw all of my creative energy into.

Elyse:

Well, and that's not new, right? Ever since humans have been creating and inventing anything, there's been good things that you can do with it. Productive, generative things that— and I don't mean productive, like, capitalism productive— I mean, literally like producing generative things that you can do with any kind of technology. Or extractive things you can do with any kind of technology, right? We complain about this with the radio. We complain about it with TV. We probably like this, this goes back for forever. But I do think that there are some really interesting ways that these abstractive tools are unlocking things for people. Color's past chief product officer, Claire Vo, has been talking a lot about the Super-IC, somebody who can do a lot of product management tasks, do a lot of design tasks, do a lot of engineering tasks, to really bring a product to life without having the need for an entire team. And I know that this connects into fears of like, Oh my God, I'm gonna lose my job, but, I actually think that's really cool as well, because I have been— even just a couple of years ago— in a place where I was like, I actually have an idea for a product that I want to experiment with. And this is when I was not in tech, I was doing a personal style program, style coaching for people. I was like, I wanna build this app. And I mean, I had worked in tech for a decade prior to that, and so it's not like I was unfamiliar with this stuff. And I still was enough out of my depth that I really couldn't get much past a like, semi-functional, janky prototype. But it was so crap. And it took me weeks and weeks, and it was not really usable, it was kind of a schmancy demo. And the other week, I was like, I wonder how different that would be now. And literally in two afternoons I created something that I think is actually functional. And again, we can talk about, what does this mean for teams? What does this mean for businesses? But I think as an individual, that's also unlocking people's creativity in a way where, if you have an idea and you're not technical, you don't know how to code, there's so much that you can do now with tools that are like, I'm gonna guide you through creating this thing. Especially in the realm of programming, like it's a computer language. Like we humans have spent all of this time cramming syntax into our brains so that we can speak to the computer. And I'm not afraid of a world in which I don't have to learn frigging type interfaces and how many semicolons and brackets go anywhere, but I can still communicate the thing that I wanna create. Like, I actually think that's really cool. Anyway, I've gone way off on a tangent. But I was leading somewhere with that. I wanna come back to something you said about the the conditions for creativity, because I am obsessed with this idea of flow state. And how important flow state is for, for challenge, for being like just on the edge of what is challenging you, and for being able to express what's happening in your brain and this idea that you have. Um, and, it's so depressing when you're like, I have this really cool idea, but to do that, then I have to spend eight months learning basic JavaScript tutorials, and I still feel so far away from being able to express this thing that I wanna make. That was a total tangent of a question, but what are the conditions for human creativity? What are the conditions for our brain and for flow state that make us like, excited and willing to be expansive with our ideas and get them out into the world?

Natalya:

I love that you mentioned flow state, because that was honestly the catalyst for, for my entire career. It's the research of Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who. I assume you'll drop a spelling

Elyse:

I'm amazed, that, like that you just dropped that—

Natalya:

The research has been so, so formative for me. When you say the flow state, let me tell you, it comes with a little graph. On one axis, on the X axis, is your skill level. And on the Y axis is the level of challenge. And flow is just that sweet spot in the middle where the appropriate skill level meets the appropriate level of challenge. And I can tell you on one end is the panic. I don't know enough JavaScript, has been yelled by many a CSS person ughh! ahhh!! You get the panic, and then you're like ah, I don't even, I'm not enjoying myself. I am not losing sense of time and feeling at one with the universe. I'm having a bad time. On the other end of that graph is boredom! Where you're like, you know what? This is so the same thing over and over again. And you feel like, I hate what I do now, I, this, I must not love it anymore, I should switch jobs, update my LinkedIn, and do something else. Or start making sourdough or get a farm.

Elyse:

Um, It's always goats.

Natalya:

The roads in web development either lead to homesteading or, um—

Elyse:

Crypto.

Natalya:

There's just two paths and that's it.

Elyse:

No, it's just one. It's always goats. It's always homesteading.

Natalya:

So the flow state is something that we're all after, as all human beings, because humans love to make, we love to create. We need to create. We don't like being bored. We don't like being panicked. We like to find that sweet spot where we're just in the zone, we're finding those conditions to be favorable. And I think that, you know, it's been a big disservice, where like foosball tables in the office don't give us the flow state. Free hoodies do not give us the flow state. Putting our desks next to each other do not give us the flow state. That's not what creates creativity, but really solid, solid pitches, everyone, we did give it a good try. What creates the flow state again is appropriate level of skill and appropriate level of challenge. And if we are able to raise what we can do with AI, or extra tools, or just any of the tools and the abstractions we've built, any of the frameworks we've built— I mean, jQuery!? My God, how many people did so many amazing things because jQuery was the gateway drug in front end development for so many designers. Oh, dollar sign, I'm in! You know, like, we're in the Matrix, I'm in!

Elyse:

Oh my God.

Natalya:

I think that the tools that we've used and how they can elevate your ability to contribute and take your skill up to where you are able to contribute are really, really broader spectrum, so that all of a sudden your ability to jump into flow broadens significantly. One personal anecdote: oh no, I'm gonna move into management, you'll never be able to do any useful code. And I'm just like, one of my spiciest takes is, managers can ship code to production now, thanks to AI!

Elyse:

Oh, no.

Natalya:

All of a sudden, if I forget some kind of syntax, that's not a problem. I can still hit my flow. I can still get to where I wanna be, even though I can feel that I am investing my skills in another skill bucket right now. And I think what a gift to be able to still access that. Now I think when we're talking about other conditions for creativity— and this is where I'll get into the nefarious ones— surveillance, time pressure and time scarcity, and— honestly, you're starting to think of a workplace. Like being told when and how to work. There are just a lot of creativity killers where you can't get into that flow. Hey, I got a 30 minute meeting in the middle of your flow. That's it. That's it for today. So it's a really interesting thing, like are we really thinking about the tools that are gonna augment our ability to get in the flow? Or are we talking about the current structures of how we work that might not serve us at the level of creativity that we are now able to work in. Just questions.

Elyse:

Definitely more questions than answers right now, but I do think that— um, and this may not reflect the reality of what we're seeing in the workplace, in workplace culture, right now— but, I do think that there's a lot of room to change the ways that we work, to change the structures in which we work. Not just, sit at your desk, look at a screen, go to a meeting. But the kind of classic software teams, product teams, a squad like this, one designer, four developers, PM, like all of that is up for grabs, in a way that I think, again, can be very scary, but also I think can be very liberating. Or should be able to be very liberating, because we have different ways of approaching success and what that looks like and how enjoyable that is, right? In the very first episode of this podcast, when I was talking with Brad Frost, he was talking about, this was literally the lede of the first bit of this podcast, was like, we started this whole design system space thinking about efficiency. And at that time, efficiency was about, is it really a good life-giving use of your time to be updating the hex color of the button on 80 pages across this website? Absolutely not. And there are lots of things that I think are up for grabs like that in our current workplace environment that we could shift into a way that is, more flow state, more creativity. And not more heads-down time, air quotes, which basically just means, leave me alone. But actually having more collaboration, more integration with each other, more communication with each other. I don't know what those look like yet, and I don't know how we get there, but I'm really excited for those things.

Natalya:

I think we have to fight for it though, because you touched on two very important things, and I'll go back to my first point, my favorite thing about design systems, is the community. And why is the design system community so special? It's'cause we're always trying to bridge that gap between design and engineering. And we're doing all the work, running back and forth, being unicorns, multitasking, multidisciplinary folks. And we've developed a skill of community building and consensus building and collaboration. And we save companies a lot of time because, well, what's what saves more money than interrupting somebody going in the wrong direction. What about now, when somebody's working alone, they don't need anybody else, because it's just them and their AI, they can go a lot faster in the wrong—

Elyse:

In the wrong direction.

Natalya:

A lot more impact, in the wrong direction. So I think, it's a fun future to think about where like Super-ICs can do everything. And it's like, how do we coordinate everybody? make sure everybody can work together. Let's make sure everybody's actually aligned, because if everybody's pulling in a slightly different direction, you're standing still. We're all super charged and superpowered, it's like, yeah, but are we aligned? And those seem like little buzzwords when you're like, I just wanna make stuff. Design system folks know, secret to patterns is alignment and agreeing, and then sometimes we talk about naming something for eight hours straight. But it's important.

Elyse:

Yeah.

Natalya:

I think in the future, you know, my ideal world isn't one where we're measured in terms of output, like on a factory floor. Like, one creative, one per hour. My creativity isn't measured per hour. Give me the things I need and the tools I need to get into that creative flow, and then you'll see, you'll see what happens. Miracles are gonna happen. And I trust the same thing on my team, where I'm like, how can I get things outta your way and things positioned in your way and try to give you as much focus and as few extra meetings or context switching cognitive shifts as possible, so that you have clarity and ability to work with the people you need to work with, collaboratively, and organize in a way that feels like straight into that flow again. Rather than boredom. Because I think the scariest thing for me is, what happens when talented people get bored? And they say, you know what? I just I could do this by myself now. Like, no! The secret and the amazing innovation's gonna be when we come together and we've got all our superpowers and we're able to collaborate together. Honestly in, in tech we've gotten it right so many times, we've gotten it super wrong so many times. I think what I'm really inspired by is just how, even just in the design system world, how many times we come in with a good faith attitude of, hey, I made a new thing and I'd like to share it with the world. So we have open source, or we're sharing things, and we're sharing materials. Because I don't know if it gets the credit or recognition that it deserves, but learning something and then creating a tool to share it with others is creativity. That's taking your mental model and changing it and transforming into something universal to share with others. You've created something original with value. So I think maybe what inspires me is, we're building this plane, as we're flying it. And as we're doing it we're throwing up pamphlets out, like, here's how to build your own plane while you fly it! And we're constantly giving back to the ecosystem. I share that excitement with you that, it's gonna be, gonna be very cool to see what we can do next.

Elyse:

I love that. I love the reframe of the Super-IC into like, what if you put a bunch of them together? If we have all of these tools now that are so much more powerful, what happens when we all get together. And that we have to be moving in the same direction. And we can't just like, eight of us go off and try to build the same thing, and we're wasting our time, wasting each other's time, wasting resources, literally environmental resources, doing the same rework. But like what happens if we get together? So, you were talking about your team. As a manager, right now— not really even thinking about the future or what magical ways of collaboration that we could have in the future— but like right now, in this kind of, um, in these unprecedented, uncertain times— but truly, like a lot of things are changing, the tools are changing, there is a lot of economic uncertainty, there's a lot of political uncertainty. How are you approaching that as a manager beyond just, you know, get these extra meetings off your calendar. Which I think hopefully is obvious, like table stakes stuff, but like, how are you talking to your team about this stuff, and how are you trying to cultivate creativity when so much really is uncertain.

Natalya:

So, first of all, I assume I fail to do so every single day, and it feels like it's gonna be an uphill battle, no matter what, but I'll never stop trying! Because my non-negotiable philosophies as a people manager, is hire people who care about making stuff and love it. Don't destroy that love and don't cash in on that. Cultivate and grow it. That is my responsibility to make sure they still love what they do. Work in partnership with them to align what they love to do with what the organization wants from us, to make sure we're working in alignment with whatever we're doing as a, as an organization. And then most importantly, have their back. I am there to serve them. I'm not there to like, crack a whip or what, whatever old model of like, I need to supervise you. You are a creative artist. You are going to innovate. You're gonna be thinking about design systems well after you shut your laptop. You're gonna be taking a walk and you're still thinking about design systems. And it's just, it's my job to find these people, put'em together, and make sure that the work that they're doing is interesting enough. Those small days of collaboration, innovation, add up to a long career of creating something good and having an impact. For me, it's just this huge responsibility of like, one, don't mess it up. I can't get it perfect. But also make it so that they can come to me and be like, dude, no, that was not cool. Keep those channels of trust open as much as possible. And if people feel safe, they will be able to access their creativity. Time scarce people who feel scared will not be able to innovate. And I think that's the biggest thing that I see, is just like, if you're in a place where people are working a very old fashioned way, where you know, it's very top down and heavy and that's— you're not gonna be able to compete in the age of AI. Because groups of creative people are gonna be able to have much wider impact with the tools that are available to them. So you wanna innovate. Hire artists and encourage, grow, and nurture human creativity, and let go some of those old corporate ways of working. Now, easier said than done! But I think for anybody who's listening who's in leadership, I think it's a really good time to examine how you personally lead, and how you are working with people, given the fact that it is a massive time of uncertainty. And you're asking people to innovate in a brand new space while they're feeling all of this anxiety. So I feel like if anything, it's a call to action for anybody in management or in leadership to think like, what am I doing to make sure that these talented, creative people are able to do their thing, with all of these tools that are now available to them.

Elyse:

Yes. A hundred percent. I love all the reminders that there's lots of ways to do creativity in our work. As a manager, as a designer, as a developer, anything new that you bring or any way that you change or adjust your team culture, those are all creative things also. What other examples, like outside of tech, do you think we can look to for interesting ways to be creative. Or ways that we can learn to be creative outside of our little tech bubble, where we have this sort of definition of creativity that is kind of flat.

Natalya:

I, I love this question. So one of the frameworks that I really enjoy— obviously design systems, I love frameworks and patterns for things. So there's this great theory by Lauren Sosniak which it goes into the phases of learning. And starts out with three kind of phases you can be in. The first phase is the play phase. When you fall in love with something, and you wander about, you do things the wrong way. Imagining just like how a child finds something, or somebody hears a cool song, or somewhere something grabs your attention and interest. I know everyone knows this feeling where you're like, that's cool. I wanna do that! I want that. And then you try that thing, and you're literally the worst at it. And it's so horrible and you feel terrible. And there's this moment where you're like—

Elyse:

Not flow state.

Natalya:

I am in panic. I will, I will never tell anyone I attempted— or you say, I'm gonna learn. I'm gonna sit down. That's when you enter the second phase, the discipline phase. It's boring. It's routine. If you heard a cool song, you're learning the scales. And you're just sitting there and you're grinding and grinding until your eyes just feel like exhausted. And this is where burnout can totally happen. If you stay here too long, you're like, I don't even love this stuff anymore. I never even liked music! You know, I'm not doing these scales again. So sometimes people quit at this phase. And the answer is no, go back to play. Go back to finding out why you love this thing. Because if you don't, you'll never make it to the third phase, which is the synthesis phase. Say you heard a song, you learn to sing, now you're able to sing opera. And express something with a level and a skill that they put you on stage and applaud you for. The play phase, the discipline phase, and the synthesis phase. And you can cycle through that in a day, in a year, in a lifetime, for all the different things. And how to be more creative in your real life is to recognize that there are phases to your creativity, there are phases where sometimes you need to make mistakes and do the wrong thing. As we pursue creativity, I think it's really important to remember. Again, it is a practice. Creativity is a practice. And when you practice, you have to be mindful of how you practice. You know that 10,000 hours? It's of deliberate practice. You can spend a lifetime doing something, but if you don't do it with intention and purpose you could still not be good at it. My favorite part of that study is, how many hours does it take to just be pretty good at something? Just not to make those rookie mistakes and just enough to where people go, wow, I guess you're pretty good at this, and you're like, yeah... sure. How many hours would you

Elyse:

guess? Half that. 5,000.

Natalya:

50.

Elyse:

Really??

Natalya:

Fifty hours.

Elyse:

Just fifty?

Natalya:

of deliberate practice, so like structured, deliberate, well-paced practice.

Elyse:

I was off by an order of magnitude or two.

Natalya:

It's not as much as you would think, to get out of making those glaring beginner mistakes, that for the unsuspecting person who's never started at all, that 50 hours puts you in the intermediate category in their eyes. And it can give you that flow state, give you that encouragement, and give you just enough skill to enjoy yourself. When I say you wanna be creative? Get pretty bad at a lot of different things, and get in the habit of learning how to learn. Find something that captures your attention. Do something wrong. Do something silly, and remember to play. if you can't find that, figure out how to get back there again. And that's your first assignment.

Elyse:

I love that. That makes me feel better about the podcast editing, because I've done 50 hours probably already of editing, because it takes so dang long. And I'm not good at it yet. Not good at it yet, but we will get there. Like, let's bring hobbies back. Let's bring back this, like, I don't have to be that good at it, that's not stopping me from putting something out there. In one of my all-time favorite books, Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks, he talks about hobbies, and he talks about the whole point of a hobby being like, a way to practice and to play and not have to be good at it. We put so much pressure on ourselves at work, and now even to like monetize our hobbies, right? Like artists being on TikTok. It's like you gotta be good at everything, and like the bar for being good at something has become so ridiculously high, that I think bringing play back into our lives, and being like, okay, I don't have to be good at this. In the book, he talks about Rod Stewart having a hobby of making model train villages, which is so funny, it's like totally separate from your professional identity. Like, you don't think like Rod Stewart, rock and roll, model trains. And I just, I love that anecdote. And I love having things in my life that have nothing to do with producing something good, per se, or being judged by anybody else, or even having any kind of monetary or like, capitalist productive value. I've recently taken up making beaded necklaces and sewing and all these things that are like, it costs me more money and time to make something like absolutely shit than it does to just go to the mall and buy something. But it brings so much play to my life, that regardless of how it actually turns out, like that's really, really valuable time.

Natalya:

I think that's the shift that we as an industry need to make. Humans are not output machines. We are creative individuals. And taking up hobbies, and sewing, and that's feeding your brain. So if you find that you're not able to pick up hobbies or you're in this place where no, I'm just gonna scroll on my phone for ages. You're tired and your brain needs, you need to work your way back to that, and remember that we're not output machines constantly supposed to be solving and solving and solving. Sometimes we need to wonder, and discover, and ask questions, and go down rabbit holes, or draw something and then never post it on social media, because it's just for you. And so that's a lot of where I say, the artist has to hold their own ruler. Because, you know, who are we creating for? We have to also make sure as humans, we're also creating for ourselves, and keeping that practice for ourselves. Because it will play out at work, it'll play out in every other part of your life if you make it a practice. And so for anybody also listening and saying like, well, easier said than done—'cause this is always easier said than done, pick up a hobby, do this— there's a lot of research on how to engage the creative habit for people. It's not just willpower. You have to create the conditions. You don't blame the plant if it doesn't grow. You put some sun, you get the soil, you water it. We are nature. We are just as simple as nature. And we need good soil, good water, and good sunshine. And so make sure you have that in your life. And then the creativity will quite literally flow.

Elyse:

I have to acknowledge that can be very hard to do. It is hard to do when the world is very scary. It's hard to do when there are pressures from work on you, when there are economic pressures, sociocultural pressures. It is always so much easier said than done, but it is also such a good reminder that— I mean, this is a design system podcast. We work in tech, I'm talking to tech people. Most of us, most of the time, we have a lot of privilege. We have a lot of space. We often have a lot of autonomy and ability to make those changes in our life to allow for more space. That doesn't necessarily make it easy, but we actually do have that space a lot of times. And I know for me, it was very, it was actually very hard to start picking up hobbies. Because I felt like I didn't have that space. I actually picked up sewing in the year that I was unemployed, after I closed my business, before I got back into tech. And I was interviewing, I was trying to find a job, I was trying to decide if I even wanted to be back in tech. But like, we needed to bring another income into the house. And I was miserable not doing anything. I mean, you said humans are not output machines, and we're not, we're not, it's, it's not steady, but we're also designed to produce. We're designed to make, we're designed to bring things into the world, I think that's a very core part of what it means to be human. I was so depressed, because I didn't have anything to be doing with myself, to be creating. And because of that I felt like I couldn't even begin to create. And I had to force myself to sit down and do something. To try and pick up something new. And specifically to pick up something that I was absolute shit at. Then that actually kind of brought that spark back. And I don't know any of the like psychological creativity research around that, but I just wanted to add that sometimes when we think we don't have that spark, it's because we're like waiting for this moment to be like, ah, I feel inspired! And for me in that really, really low place, I had to just be like, this is shit and I'm doing it anyway. And that is what helped bring back some of the oh, like that moment when I actually made something, I was like, oh shit, like, how fucking cool is that? Oh my god, I can't believe I actually was able to make something, in a moment where I didn't feel like I had anything to give.

Natalya:

I love that story. And I feel that, you identified the little core of why so many people don't start, is they think it's supposed to feel a certain way right away. When I say it's a practice, I mean, it's like going to the gym. You don't wanna go, but you're always glad you went. You don't wanna be doing it. You're sweaty. Everything hurts. And nobody expects you to lift a million pounds on day one. You have to pace yourself. You have to be honest with yourself of where you are and what you're capable of, just a little bit at a time. Show up. Show up for yourself. Keep the promises you make to yourself. Because like you said, we're not output machines, like we're not supposed to stand, on a factory floor hammering one nail. We're meant to create. And we're meant to engage with our senses, and with our full faculties, to synthesize ideas, to apply our skill, and to connect with others who also create. One of the things that keeps me very grounded, optimistic for the future, is, the tools we use change all the time. The tools that are emerging, unbelievable. They're gonna change how we create. But they're not gonna change the fact that we must create.

Elyse:

Beautiful. It's so true. I love that so much. Going back to design systems specifically, I am gonna ask the question about, you know, predictions. And this is not gonna age well and that is okay. What are some design system specific predictions, tools, things that you think are going to happen, places you see design systems evolving, right now.

Natalya:

I'll give this a shot. So for a long time we've been looking at UI for humans to click around on. We haven't been thinking about like, okay, now, there's an API for, you know, AI. What are we gonna do with that? We've also been thinking about you think of a design system, you think about a button, how long's that gonna be the case? And here's another one that I'm thinking about is, I hope in the future, I don't have to say, we wrote all this down, but people won't read. I'm not worried about people reading now. They are going to be gently guided into using my design guidelines anyway, with a nice little helper helping them along. I think there is such power in, in the design system not just being a collection of code or components, it's our domain knowledge, bundled together in a beautiful way. So that we can focus on guiding, through our creativity, on the best practices, on the way to do things. And we can actually align a large number of people through our guidance.

Elyse:

First of all, the documentation thing, I think we are on the cusp of, like this year, or next year, we are going to see, I think, big adoption of the design system documentation chatbot. I'm in Cursor, I'm in GitHub Copilot, something that's connected to your own code base, and you're working, and it's gonna just generate for you, with your components, with your tools, already connected there to those design guidelines. But more importantly, the second thing is, are those guidelines even for humans anymore?

Natalya:

Exactly. I think what's really interesting is also, are they for English speaking humans? You can translate anything into any language, how amazing, how many more people are able to access your information? Personally, I think that we're abstracting our expertise, and now we're going to enable others, who are not experts, to contribute in a much higher way, getting into the flow better, even if they're not the ones to read.

Elyse:

Another future for design systems that I think is inevitable, is what Dan Mall was saying is that, design systems are a transition phase. We are building all these things to bridge that design and code gap. I think AI tools are going to eliminate that gap, right? I'm really actually quite excited about what that means for design system practitioners, when we don't have to rebuild a React button or an input for the umpteenth time. And we can instead think about these higher order problems of, how do we actually align an organization around a design direction? I don't know what that looks like, but we're out here making that future real.

Natalya:

There are just so many echoes in what you said of, design systems are gonna kill our creativity, whereas all we're trying to do is free you back up again, so you don't have to design or change the same button over and over again. The same idea of just like, are all these AI tools gonna kill our creativity? It's like, no, we're gonna free us up to be able to make larger impact across a greater ecosystem.

Elyse:

That's the dream anyway.

Natalya:

That's the dream, that's the promise. Let's keep working towards it.

Elyse:

So to wrap up, this is gonna be the last spicy take of the whole first season of On Theme. Natalya, tell us your spicy take on design systems.

Natalya:

My spiciest take is that we're not afraid of getting faster at our work. What we're afraid of is getting faster at our work and having no time anyway.

Elyse:

Hm. Mm-hmm.

Natalya:

Design systems sped people up. And then we filled up their time just the same. How are we still so time scarce after design systems? We are saving people time all over the place! We've got components left and right. In our bid to get buy-in for design systems, we've also over polished and over-engineered them, way more complex than they need to be. We made sure they had everything, with the bells and whistles, and now we have to document the bells and whistles, and now we have to maintain the bells and whistles, and maybe sometimes we should deprecate at least the bells. Or the whistles. Or maybe both. So what, what is going to happen when the way we create is changed?

Elyse:

I loved every single minute of this conversation, Natalya, thank you so much for schooling us on what creativity is, and the flow state, all of the psychology. We forget that there's so much more around us than just, the work, the UI, the screen, the code, the Figma. And it's such a good reminder to look, to pick our heads up, and to look a little bit outside of the fear and the uncertainty and the how things are, and start to imagine what could be. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Natalya:

Thank you for having me.

Elyse:

Thanks for listening to On Theme. This is a brand new podcast, so if you like what you're hearing, please subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform and at DesignSystemsOnTheme. com to stay in the loop. See you next episode!