On Theme: Design Systems in Depth

What comes after the infinite canvas? with Robin Cannon

• Elyse Holladay • Season 2 • Episode 3

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 55:03

Y’all know I am fully bought in on design-with-code tools, so I loved this episode with Robin Cannon, VP of Product at Knapsack and former IBM Carbon and J.P. Morgan Salt design system exec, on why he thinks the infinite canvas is obsolete, and what we might replace it with. 

Robin chats with us about a future where software design happens in the same medium as production code, making the “infinite canvas” abstraction obsolete. But what does “designing with code” really look like today… and in the future? We explore a world with tools that could enable us to build with design-system rules plus broader product context. Plus we discuss why today’s design-with-code tools aren’t quite there yet, the enterprise barriers to working in new ways, and you as a designer can make this shift.


Links & References


💖 Season 2 of On Theme is officially here! 🎉 💖 If you like what you're hearing from On Theme, hit subscribe in your favorite podcast platform and sign up to get episode release notes at designsystemsontheme.com! On Theme is  sponsor free and listener supported, so please support the show with a monthly donation.




📲 Send me a text!

Support the show

Robin Cannon

When I talk about the canvas becoming obsolete, I really mean like the infinite canvas as an abstraction. I do think like a restricted canvas that uses the things you are allowed to use but understands when you are talking about or moving something about in plain English, it can reply to you in plain English, but under the hood there is a full understanding of the props, the guidance, honestly, even more than just your design system.

Elyse

Your whole code base.

Robin Cannon

Your code base, but your regulatory environment, your accessibility requirements, your brand guidelines, all of these things that exist in a broader product context.

Elyse

Tell me more about this idea of the restricted canvas, because I think it's very hard for designers to imagine not having that free blank space. If we don't start there, what do we start with?

Robin Cannon

You start with the problem statement and what you're trying to achieve. And then you can, if you have the right context, you can have AI populate that canvas with what your design system, as interpreted by an AI, would build to solve that problem. A lot of the questions I hear is like, how do I go from my Figma design of a product to that implemented in code? My question is, well, why are you trying to create the abstraction in the first place?

Elyse

Say it again. Say it again. 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. Let's dive into the show. Today's guest is Robin Cannon. He is a product and design exec with a decade of design system leadership experience, including at IBM's Carbon and JP Morgan's Salt design system. He's now at Knapsack as the VP of Product, to work on the hard problem of what happens when the canvas isn't the center of the design process anymore. He writes essays on design and AI infrastructure, as well as speculative fiction exploring what complex systems do to the humans inside them. You can check that out at robin-cannon.com. Robin, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Robin Cannon

Thank you. I'm really excited. It's a fun topic to be talking about and generally, I think, leads to a lot of spicy takes and controversy and good fun debates.

Elyse

We love a spicy take on this show. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation because you are one of the most vocal people, at least in my LinkedIn bubble, about designing with code. And listeners of this podcast, you probably know, I'm extremely bullish on the idea of designing with code, and so I wanna get right into that thesis. Which is, I believe, and I, and I think you do too, Robin, that for 90% of what we build in software, we can design using code and using the design system. Vector design programs are never gonna make anything more than a fancy screenshot, a picture of the UI, maybe a very close picture, but not actually the real deal. And I think that we both believe that the future of designing software is gonna be code under the hood. But, today, you know, we're recording this in March of 2026, and today, when we say design with code, I think most designers experience, and what they picture, is generating some Tailwind slop UI via a natural language prompt, you know, in something like Lovable, or Bolt, or Subframe, where your interface is a natural language prompt. So, I wanna hand it right over to you. Tell me the world that you envision when you say we should be designing with code?

Robin Cannon

It's the idea of you don't need to be using an abstraction. That we've reached the point in technology where designers and developers can be working in the same plane, with different views. Designing in something that's real, I think that's the biggest thing. Years ago on Carbon, I would have designers who would start to learn how to do bits of JavaScript or bits of CSS, because they were getting annoyed at how long it would take to fix a single small thing that had been bugging them. But now I think we are really talking about something that, for a designer, it can look like Figma and have an interface similar to Figma, and for a developer it can have an interface like Cursor. And you're switching back and forth with them in a really effective way. It's the product context. It's not canvas as an abstraction.

Elyse

I keep saying this, like, we have the code components already. In any effective and established design system, you have Figma components and you have code components, but you already have the code components. And they are always gonna have more states, more functionality, more behavior than is representable in a vector program. And so I'm really excited about the idea of being able to work, as I'm designing, with all of those details and states, with all of the actual capabilities of any given component, right? If you have something like an auto complete search, there's all kinds of things that it can do that aren't necessarily represented in Figma. But also there's just the sensation of actually using it. And so when you're building something that you can actually type in, see it on mobile, see how fast it is, if it feels smooth, if that feels like it makes sense. And that's the kind of stuff that I think is just impossible to do in a vector program. And I think a lot of designers would agree that they get a lot of value out of seeing it happen, right? Once they see the real thing that the engineer built, they have more thoughts about how it should work, and they have more opinions about what it should do. And I will also say that right now a lot of, or most of the"design with your design system in code tools" don't really give you the experience that I'm actually envisioning.

Robin Cannon

Yeah, I'm not sure we are quite there yet. In the sense of it should be equally smooth for a designer to make tweaks and refinements. I think that we're at the point now where you can vibe code something that can reference your design system, and can reference the coded components even, and give you something that is of a decent quality. AI gets you to okay. The problem right now in all our tools is, designers need to be able to tweak that in a design interface. And that doesn't exist. And that's why you're seeing some of these, to me, weird pushes back, hey, we've got something coded that works. We need to make some minor refinements to the UX or the UI, let's take it back to an abstraction stage.

Elyse

Let's actually break down some of the use cases here. The one that you just mentioned is, a designer needs to actually"polish", and I'm putting that in nice big air quotes because I don't really believe that it's polish, but, look at something that's actually in production and do some refinement of the UI in a very precise way, down to spacing, sizing, alignment, just like really doing that refinement work. So that's one use case. I think there's another use case where there is building or prototyping something entirely new, using your system. But you know, is this even the right flow? Is this even the right ux? What might it feel like if we used a checklist here or cards or a, a search or whatever. And then I think there's actually a third use case, which is a really substantial one, which is, we just need to build something that works exactly like all the other things that we have in the system. We're building our umpteenth form that works exactly like all of the other forms that came before it. And I just need to put those things together and make sure that it all is right and follows my product or design requirements. But I'm building it entirely with the system.

Robin Cannon

And I think here's where the parallels are similar for developers, where developers are looking, and it's, this is a really simple fix that I am comfortable letting AI vibe code the solution for, because it's low risk, low blast radius. There are design solutions and design tasks that are very similar. And then there are like, this is a bigger feature, this is more exploratory. Even if I have a coded prototype, now I wanna be able to drag and drop and resize and change and update and move the flows around. Because this is something that is more creative or brand new.

Elyse

I wanna talk a little bit more about what we think the actual future of these tools and these workflows is gonna look like, because we've said, okay I don't think the tools are there. What do you imagine the tools are going to be like?

Robin Cannon

Well, you know what the funniest thing is, that we kind of invented these tools about 30 years ago and we didn't have the technology to do it. Because if you go back and look at the things like Macromedia Dreamweaver, even before Adobe bought it, or Microsoft Frontpage, what they were trying to do is, hey, look, here's the code, and here's the visual view, and when you change it in one place, it changes in the other place. And you can work on this as a non-technical designer, or you can work on it as a non-design expert developer. Now we know that the, we wanna talk about slop, then the code that those things created was terrifying. But it's that concept and I think we're starting to see it. There are definitely some products out there now, where they have, here's the code view, here's the design view. And they might have some limited in-app tools, either from a code perspective, or from a design perspective. But I think fundamentally what you're gonna need is something that is close to as good as Figma, and as good or close to as good as Cursor, in the same experience. That's the creative experience, but then also, that needs to be able to take in the context it needs. So that what you are creating is of a decent quality first, that you can then apply the human judgment that you need, either as a developer or a designer.

Elyse

This is actually a place I think that AI is doing something that the tools that you were just referencing couldn't do. Webflow really did this for websites, but Flutterflow, WeWeb, there's like a handful of other tools that we're trying to make a visual UI for building a website or a web app. And I think what was so challenging about those is if you're gonna build a UI that lets you do CSS, you have to put the entirety of CSS into a UI. And I actually see this as a place where we will not have a Figma-like visual interface in these tools because, you can't put literally everything that's possible to do with the entire CSS API into a UI. And one of the things that I think AI actually can do is interpret via natural language, some of the ways that designers want to explore and experiment and turn that into, oh, I can do this with a prop on the component, or, these are the available props on the component, or these are the things that the CSS spec can do. One of the things that I'm seeing is that designers, I mean, this is the entirety of"bridging the gap between design and engineering", but designers speak about the things that they wanna do in a very different way than engineers. The kinds of words that designers use isn't code words, they're not saying change this prop, they're saying, make it do this, make it not go away when I click.

Robin Cannon

Right.

Elyse

But those are props and the components or the API. And so that interpretation layer, I think is the really interesting thing, because I actually don't think that pixel pushing UI, change this padding to seven pixels, is actually the, maybe we need the ability to do that sometimes, but actually in a lot of use cases we don't.

Robin Cannon

When I talk about the canvas becoming obsolete, I really mean like the infinite canvas as an abstraction. I do think like a restricted canvas that uses the things you are allowed to use but understands when you are talking about or moving something about in plain English, it can reply to you in plain English, but under the hood there is a full understanding of the props, the guidance, honestly, even more than just your design system.

Elyse

Your whole code base.

Robin Cannon

Your code base, but your regulatory environment, your accessibility requirements, your brand guidelines, all of these things that exist in a broader product context than just your design system guidance and your design system code.

Elyse

Tell me more about this idea of the restricted canvas or like, what do you mean by the canvas? Because I think it's very hard for designers to imagine not having that free blank space. And even on the code side, I've been designing with CSS for the entirety of my career, and even when I start, I'm like, new page, blank screen, start putting some frames on the page. That's divs, it's code rather than using a Figma frame. But it's still starting from that blank space. So if we don't start there, what do we start with?

Robin Cannon

I think where we are now, particularly if you have that context, you start with the problem statement and what you're trying to achieve. And then you can, if you have the right context, you can have AI populate that canvas with what your design system, as interpreted by an AI, would build to solve that problem. And I think this is one of the biggest things, like a lot of the questions I hear is like, how do I go from my Figma design of a product to that implemented in code? My question is, well, why are you trying to create the abstraction in the first place?

Elyse

Say it again. Say it again.

Robin Cannon

If you have the context that your design system provides, you can say, make me a login form. Or, I need to explore a couple of different flows for signup and registration for X service. And it should be able to create something that is much more adherent than a context less non determinative

Elyse

The future is here The future is here. We literally do that every day at Color now. Being able to start with that and not have that translation layer. And I'm excited about that, for the the plain reason of the best designs that I've created in my career have been working with a designer and an engineer. Sometimes I'm playing the design role, sometimes I'm playing the engineer role. We always come to some better solution, a better visual solution, a better functional solution, a better code solution when we can all get together and actually work on the same thing in a really collaborative way. And I agree, I don't think the tools are 100% there, but I'm seeing that shift happen in real time, and I think that's really, really exciting. But I know that listeners are thinking right now, Elyse, you work at a small company, and I work at a really big company and, uh, I can't do that. So, Robin, you obviously have worked at some massive organizations. These tools are starting to emerge. But if you work at a really big enterprise, you can't just say, hey, let's just turn this on today, let's all start working in this way. What is making it not possible for big organizations to work in this way right now?

Robin Cannon

Yeah, I mean I think big organizations have always struggled to work in an agile way, and I mean the description rather than, rather than the process. And there's lots of reasons for that. There's cultural inertia. There's procurement issues. There's a lot more checks and balances for being able to just go ahead and use software and experiment with it. I think that you also hit tipping points very quickly. So if I think back to IBM, my first couple of years at IBM, IBM was using Sketch, even at a point where Figma was becoming, bigger and bigger and really taking over in terms of this is the tool designers want to use. And it took a long time, and then suddenly there was just like, a flip, where the internal pressure from practitioners became so large, that IBM essentially just had, basically, I'd say the only way we can move forward, and get the talent we want and the design quality we want is to make the right tools available. So there's that part of it. I think the other thing, and you talked about it a little bit, is that for individuals, there's a point there where you can say, hey, I did X thing, I've done my part in this task. And that is something that is a natural handover point, which means it's a natural checkpoint. So I think one of the biggest things, and the biggest problems, that large scale enterprises are having is like, well, where are the human touchpoints? And how can we integrate human touchpoints into an AI accelerated workflow in an effective way so that for all our legal regulatory business requirements, we are reducing risk. Because I think the biggest thing about non-determinative AI is risk, and at enterprise scale that risk is also enterprise scale.

Elyse

I one of the things that I'm hearing you say is also the idea of iterating on software, being a living, constantly in creation thing that we're building and we're constantly releasing. The way you want to work often is very iterative. You wanna sit down with your PM and your engineer and the, your requirements and iterate on the thing. And you get to some point and you're like, okay, let's get that out, because we're at a MVP moment, and let's come back and work on this edge case. Let's come back and work on this feature. Let's come back and work on improving this once we get a little bit of information. But that's actually a very challenging way for organizations, big or small, to work, because there's no moment where you can say, okay, this part is done. We're just doing stuff and we are just keeping on doing stuff until we get to some place where we're happy. And that is not trackable, or it's very hard to track. It opens up a lot of like ambiguous room for risk and for confusion and for communication problems. I wonder from your perspective, how much of the challenge for organizations is not actually around the tools? We work in health tech, like we are very sensitive to the risk of PHI and security, so I hear you on that. But aside from that, how much of the hesitation here, or the resistance here, is simply around. We don't know how to do this process if everybody is getting to just be in it together.

Robin Cannon

Yeah, I mean it's very kind of like improvisational jazz delivery.

Elyse

The new Agile, folks.

Robin Cannon

If you think about any, anywhere I've worked there's always a pressure like, you have to ship something. And however good the intentions are, you're never gonna go back and fix all of those edge cases. So I think that like having some demonstration or some capacity to, within a new workflow, determine, okay, here is a release. Here is something that we can point to as a feature being shipped. Is that gonna stay the same? If it doesn't stay the same, then what does it get replaced with, in terms of measurement? I think a lot of this is just much more rapid iteration. If you think about the double diamond, then you're fundamentally, you're talking about like design, build, measure, iterate, go around again. Well you are making design and build become the same thing. Measurement gets much, much faster. Iteration gets much, much faster. And so instead of that being a quarterly process, now it's like a weekly process or even less. And I think that's terrifying for enterprise because big enterprise is not used to moving

Elyse

that fast.. And I, not to be grim about it, but I really do believe that there's a moment coming up, you were talking about the Figma to Sketch transition, I do think that there's a moment coming for big organizations where the rug is being pulled out from under you is gonna happen, where I do think these design with code tools are gonna become really powerful quickly. Like they're not totally there yet, but I think this year we're gonna see really substantial improvements in how these design with code tools work. Right now I'm seeing so much focus on Figma to code. And everybody lost their minds when it was like, oh, now we can go Claude to Figma. You can have it generate in Figma some frames of a thing that you've built in code, which is a better direction, I guess, but we're still doing this kind of unnecessary translation. And I think there's gonna come a moment where a couple of these tools are going to really successfully figure out what this UI looks like. Not the process inside organizations, but just simply the UI, the ability to have a canvas for lack of a better term, with your code components under the hood that has your context. We're just so focused on Figma right now, especially big companies who can't necessarily like, procure some new tool. I'm just really afraid that everybody is gonna be like, oh, we spent all year of 2026 trying to like, make Figma generate good code. And then all of a sudden now this other thing is here, and now what do we do?

Robin Cannon

I mean, I think, I think we might. Already we're like, we've stopped trying to help Figma generate good code, and

Elyse

Generate Figma.

Robin Cannon

code, generate good Figma.

Elyse

Yeah,

Robin Cannon

and so, know, which

Elyse

just, yeah. Say it's bonkers.

Robin Cannon

to me. Yeah. But the way I think about it, maybe it's not design in code. Maybe it's like build with plain English. Because I think, it may be apocryphal, but I have a, an old manager at IBM told me that Steve Wozniak at Apple way back in the days, like you should always be able to explain your design intent in prose. I think that if you have that, plus context, plus then the ability to refine both visually and in code, that's the way we are gonna be able to go. So that you can get something that is 90% correct if you can give it the right problem. It understands your company's broad product context. You've got that control plane where you are orchestrating multiple different sources. You're actually orchestrating them in a way that you can resolve conflict and then your output is 90% complete and 90% correct. Then that's where human excellence comes in. Because this is my other big thing is like we're already getting very quickly to the point where AI can create good, solid, generic, boring stuff, very quickly and very cheaply. And therefore the only differentiating factor at that point becomes how good it is.

Elyse

Yeah. And I'm honestly getting tired of the taste argument, but I do think that there's something around quality, excellence, taste, something. Like if everybody can generate all of these things, what makes mine better or more useful? I wanna touch on something that you said here about putting all of the context in and that the LLMs can do a pretty good job of generating, the boring thing. I know that for a lot of designers, and engineers too, a lot of fear and frustration around, but if it can generate all of this stuff, like, what's my role? What's the thing that I'm doing? I actually feel like what you were just describing, taking in that context, taking in the business context, taking in the requirements and the constraints, taking in the design system, that is in a lot of cases, 90% of what the job is anyway. One of the points, the whole point, of a design system was to take some of those decisions and codify them in some way so that you're not having to make those decisions over and over again. And I see having that stuff documented as incredibly valuable to humans, not just to LLMs. I think one of my favorite, like snarky things that I've seen about all of this is, it took LLMs to get us to write good documentation. And it's I know it would've been really nice for humans this whole time.

Robin Cannon

Yeah. I mean, I think you're right, because the design systems, I always think that what makes something a design system is not here's component library, it's here's what we are trying to strive for in terms of delivering good digital experiences. So the best design systems are the ones that have places where like, here is how we try to strive for the best accessibility. Here's what you can get out the box in terms of component accessibility, but then here's the fuzzier part of it, that the design system can't control, because you can put those components together in lots of different ways. Or here's how we are trying to think about universal design as a concept. And those are principles as well as just execution standards. And I think those are the areas where a design system and the broader context of a company is really important in terms of differentiating themselves whether it's humans building stuff or it's LLMs building stuff.

Elyse

Right. And we've always been trying to do that with the design system, to say, hey, designer, you have some use case you're designing against, you have some constraints, you have some product requirements, you have business metrics that you are trying to hit with this thing. 80% of those decisions, those design decisions, should already be made for you, in the sense that you don't need to think about form spacing or what an input looks like, and this is like obvious atomic stuff that every design system person who's listening is like, yeah, duh. But imagine if you had to make all those decisions every single time! And then you have this other 20% where you're getting to spend your energy on, does this meet the needs of the thing that I'm trying to make? Where can I get creative with building the actual problem I'm trying to solve, rather than thinking about building all of the little Legos that go into it. This is what we've always been doing. I really see that happening with design with code tools, in a more precise, higher fidelity, and more defined way. And my hope is truly, like my hope is that this is not at all about the LLMs can design and now you aren't needed because at least in this year of our AI overlords 2026, that is not the case, but also that it gives you, you, the designer, more space and time to be thinking about the really hard problem of what it is you're actually trying to make and whether or not it's good. And that is my hope for this way of working.

Robin Cannon

I think that is the way. I mean, I think that, and this has always been the issue of design systems. I was, 10 years ago I was talking about this on Carbon where, when you're trying to talk about or allay the fears, of design systems are limiting, it's do you want to design that button again? Or do you want to design the solution that your user needs? And it's that at speed and at scale, even more so now. AI is pattern recognition, and so it can't do anything if there isn't a pattern for it to recognize. And the only creatures who can do that is us, people. Who can be like, I'm going to create something genuinely new. I'm gonna think about this from all different perspectives and then I can use AI to my ability to do that. And that's gonna be true for designers and for coders. The people who can think of something new, with taste, judgment, really the ability to accept and understand and deal with ambiguity, are the ones who are gonna succeed. The weird irony, I think, is that we've spent the last 20 years as a society forcing people away from exactly the kind of education that supports that, and we've been forcing people into more vocational execution focused education. And it's execution, which is exactly what AI is automating.

Elyse

Yeah, and I, understand and empathize so much with the fear and uncertainty that everybody's feeling right now around AI and around the improving quality of AI output. But I, I also feel very strongly if the only thing that you feel like you can offer is your ability to, you know, write semicolons and functions and, move pixels around, like I think you're deeply undervaluing your own brain and your own value that you can bring, uh, to not just like the value to a business, but like to the world. Like you are not limited to pure production work. And you know, I've been saying, when I'm talking to people about this, that we had the pejorative code monkey like 20 years ago.

Robin Cannon

Right.

Elyse

I think we've known for a really long time that the execution work, is not the most exciting or compelling or rewarding or valued—

Robin Cannon

Right.

Elyse

—part, like yeah, the code is the deliverable to the outcome, but it's not actually the outcome in and of itself.

Robin Cannon

Yeah. I mean, it might be an old episode of The West Wing, where they're having an argument of, oh, it costs some pharmaceutical company, you know, half a cent to make this pill that they're charging$25 for. It's like, yeah, the second pill costs half a cent, but the first pill costs$6 million in research. And it's that it's, we are, we have the capability to do the exploration that then allows for the execution. And I don't think AI can do that yet. And I'm not sure it will ever be able to do that.

Elyse

Yeah, totally. I think one of the things that I also hear is I miss, or I will miss, the ability to do exploratory things. And I think this was a problem with the kind of five years ago iteration of building web apps with UIs tools, was that because you were trying to encode every possible CSS thing that could ever be done into a UI, it did actually become very limiting. But again, with the LLMs under the hood, you have this interesting opportunity to be like I'm using the system and then I wanna tweak it in this way, or I wanna play with it. But I also think that the prompting is actually a limiting interface for designers. Like again, if we think about 80% of the use cases being like, make me the form that's like all of the other forms and I just use the components out of the box. But then there's, I wanna make a a hero moment or like a really interesting animated thing, or like something that's like a brand moment. That's always been a place where I think a design system to date has not done well. Like we aren't, traditionally, like design systems are not good at providing tools to let the designers go there. And I'm curious how you think about those kinds of moments and that kind of designing the 20%, or the weird thing, the one off outlier and how these tools might actually enable that.

Robin Cannon

Yeah. I think like the prompting part, I think we are all, we've all had the experience, like the more you try and discuss and refine from the initial prompt, the worse it gets, particularly when it comes to something visual. That's why you need to be able to see something real, even to the point that you can scribble all over it. And that's the capacity we need. Maybe it isn't so much a canvas as we need a whiteboard with a bunch of people like talking and showing at each other and, riffing on an idea and drawing weird blocks and circles. And right now, if you come back to that a week later, nobody has any idea and remembers what they were doing. But if you are automatically transitioning that into, okay, here are the components that are available. Oh, here's a big glowing orange circle, because somebody's put an idea in that isn't a component that exists or a pattern that exists. Those are the kind of workflows that I think that you can spend a lot of time on. We're gonna learn how to use these in different ways. I think that, you go back a couple of hundred years, and, artists saying, oh, nobody's gonna be able to explore ideas with painting anymore,'cause they've invented photography. And not only did painting find its own way, but also photography found its own way to move from just, hey, I've captured a thing to, here is compositional intelligence that makes photography art. And I think we'll be on the same path at some point when in that, in the ways in which we use AI.

Elyse

I actually see design work and where we're doing different parts of design work, just moving around, right? I think one of my frustrations with the modern design process is that any, anything that you're gonna do starts immediately with a high fidelity canvas and immediately with the design system components. And I actually have been spending more time sketching. Um, I know one of the designers at my company has been doing that. It's kind of like sketch straight into, building in code with the code components. I keep coming back to this idea of like hero moments, but you know, in any given flow of a product that you're trying to build, maybe 80 or 90% of it is straight design system stuff. And then there's, one or two places where you can really put something that feels very, connected or empathetic moments that actually make it feel very good.

Robin Cannon

Because you're building for humans and therefore you have to create human moments.

Elyse

Yes.

Robin Cannon

Yeah. I think one of even if we move past even the idea of I am designing a thing, a particular experience, I think the next part is like we have algorithmic content in social media it's starting to get to the point where we can also potentially have algorithmic interfaces. then that's a whole kind of other design challenge because it's like you are not designing, like this is the default set screen for people. You are saying, here are the parameters how we like to represent ourselves. And different users with different profiles are going to get different experiences. How do we maintain a brand identity? How do we maintain human moments? What does design mean at that point? Because it, at that point, it becomes a much more fluid thing. And that's where actually I think like sketching things that are lower fidelity is gonna be even more important because the full fidelity or high fidelity implementations are gonna be much too rigid for us to make any real judgment against.

Elyse

I'm very curious and excited to see that because I know personalization is such a buzzword and has been for a long time. You have different, parts of your persona, whether that's demographics or use cases, and to date we just haven't really been able to do a whole lot with that. I think that there's a really interesting challenge for designers, but for design systems in particular to say, okay, here's a dashboard, and you're gonna get really different not even just different like content, but maybe even different UI entirely.

Robin Cannon

Yeah. Based

Elyse

on your persona, your use cases, the things you're trying to do, uh, you know, the, the tasks you've done in the past. And right now that is entirely programmatic. And I'm really curious to see what's gonna happen when that becomes somewhat deterministic. And what does it mean for a designer to be able to design against something like that where there is not a single, persona A, persona B, persona C, here's the three different variants of the screen.

Robin Cannon

No. That goes all the way back to that idea of, yeah. We have algorithmic content and algorithmic content silos people, it can silo people in good ways and in bad ways. Algorithmic interfaces are gonna do the same, and I think it's gonna be really important to go back to those principles and philosophies about design systems, they're gonna become increasingly important about striving for things like universal design. You going to have algorithmic that block out people who have a particular disability, even though and we know that these things tend to happen anyway in, in other aspects of life and online, but we know also how many people are going to have some kind of disability at some point in their life. So if you can design and create philosophies and principles of design that for universal design, you're probably going to get better end results, even if you don't have total control over what the interface is gonna be for any individual

Elyse

Yeah, I'm thinking about that tactically. What might a design tool or a design system be able to offer to help a designer think systemically about all of those different use cases, those different personas, those different, combinations that might need to be made? Because right now, again, that's very programmatic. I have no idea what it looks like to let that be deterministic based on, not just the user's persona or demographics or the algorithm but also maybe something that I put in, into my own, settings or my own preferences. Thinking about an individual screen or set of flows is something that our tools really lock us into right now. And I don't just mean Figma, that was not a Figma dis, I think that's true in code too, our code is programmatic. Our code is in files, our code is grouped in folders. And I'm getting, you know, very speculative here, but

Robin Cannon

Right.

Elyse

In imagining and sketching, you have this freedom to say, well, and then this could happen and it could go over here, and that would happen. And so I just, I think that we might be able to see that come to life in the future. And I don't know what that looks like yet.

Robin Cannon

I there, I thought randomly just struck me as it's almost the next step is does design become choose your own adventure games? But beyond that, design become like tabletop role playing games where it's very freeform and it's just a general set of principles and rules, but the experience is fundamentally infinite. And the reason it's fundamentally infinite is still because of the human audience and the way they feed back to it as well.

Elyse

Was it Murphy Trueman Just writing about this.

Robin Cannon

Oh, really? There was another article about MMOs.

Elyse

Yes, this was an article from Murphy Truman the other day. She says,"The Dungeon Master is the person running the rules and the world part ref, part simulator, responding in real time to whatever the player's attempt and a good dungeon. Dungeon Master isn't an author who writes the story in advance and delivers it to the table, but they're an interpreter. Someone who understands the rules well enough to respond faithfully to whatever a player tries, including things the rule book never explicitly anticipated".

Robin Cannon

Yes, I like that. It's funny, that seems to be like, so maybe we're all thinking along the same line. Erica Flowers as well on Zero Vector, she had a piece about how agentic development is like MMOs. So you have like your party and you essentially, agent development is you have your tank and you have your DPS and you have your crowd control and you have your healer. And we're maybe there's enough

Elyse

Buncha nerds.

Robin Cannon

Enough nerds in the design and development space that we're all thinking about that. But I thought that was quite funny as well.

Elyse

Yeah, love that. Okay, so bringing it back from the distant future to today. If you are a designer who is excited about designing in code or thinking about working with your engineers in this way, Robin, what would you tell somebody really interested in this, maybe they're working at an organization that is resistant, or maybe not even resistant, but just not there yet and they want to work in this way. What are the kinds of skills that they can be exploring, and even if you can't get your company to procure some piece of software for you, what are the ways that, as a designer, you might be able to go and work with your engineers or your team or your PMs to kind of work in this way, even without the tools?

Robin Cannon

It's not starting with the tool anyway. It's starting with the seams between all the handover places and understanding different fidelities. And I don't just mean visual fidelity and I don't just mean low, medium, and high. Like code fidelity or data fidelity. So find something that you can build, find something you design a lot, like a form or a modal or a table or something like that, and just learn how to prototype it in code. And that might be learning how to prototype it in something like Webflow, it might be learning how to prototype it using Claude or Claude Code. Or it might be you just wanna dive in and actually learn how to code this in a static way with HTML and CSS. But fundamentally you're not becoming an engineer, but you are learning about what engineering fidelity can mean, as well as design fidelity. So it's not about designer must code or coder must design. It is about like having enough of that shared language and shared understanding, so that whether it's humans working with humans, or humans working with agents, that the communication channels and the, there's no walls to throw things over.

Elyse

Yes. This is the ultimate bridging the gap, right? It's that there is no gap, that we are in the same medium working together on the same thing. I love that. I love the reminder that the focus isn't about the tools. I think right now everybody is really obsessed with the tools. Can this tool do that? What model are you using? Uh, Figma this, Claude that. I know that there's a lot of movement in tools right now. There's a lot of new and exciting tools right now. But if there's any lesson from the last, 10 or 20 years of software development, in my opinion, it's being too locked into any particular tool. And again, that's not a Figma dis— maybe it's a little bit of a Figma dis— it's Figma, but it's also like it's React, right? So many people, so many organizations are using React, and I don't even think that React was the best framework that should have won that fight, but here we are. And so I love the focus to just be like, okay, it's not about the tool.

Robin Cannon

Yeah, tho those are great examples. Yeah, Figma, I mean, like, a little bit of a dis on Figma, but also, whether it's conscious or unconscious, that Figma's work around AI is to keep you in Figma.

Elyse

Of course.

Robin Cannon

Because it's to keep them relevant. So they're addressing a business problem rather than your problem. Which is what a lot of large companies start to evolve towards doing as well. React now is very powerful, very well developed, but how much of an impact on the development of web components and just framework agnostic coding solutions, how much of a negative impact has the dominance of React had on that?

Elyse

Or on web performance.

Robin Cannon

I mean it, or on web performance, all these kind of things? And again, we're not even thinking about universal design. Okay, if everything's a huge React app and you are in the global south with a lower technology phone and a very limited bandwidth connection, how much are we undermining so many people's experiences? Because everything is being built from people with a particular perspective and with a particular technology, who are really super, super passionate about technologies and tools. Yeah, it's fun to experiment with different things, but I don't get super excited about a hammer I own, right? Oh, I'm so excited about that hammer, I must find a use for the hammer. No, I have a bunch of different tools. What's the right tool for this problem? And we're gonna see a consolidation in all these tools anyway, and we are not gonna have individually a great deal of control over it. So we need to be dealing with the problems, not the tools.

Elyse

Yeah, and that's a great lesson in general. I think a lot of the fear and uncertainty right now is like, well, I know Figma, like that's what I'm good at, that's what I do. I know React, that's the kind of engineering that I do. And being a little bit more of a generalist and developing different skills and developing different abilities to work with various tools and various things to solve a problem, to reach for whatever tool, you can use or is at hand, I think is a really, powerful, uh, reminder. And I, you know, everybody's saying like, oh, in, in the future, like, these are the skills, but I, I think those are always the skills that have made people really successful.

Robin Cannon

Right. Yeah, and I think this goes back to that, that education aspect I touched on earlier. So my degree is in politics, and with a focus on like classical Greek political philosophy. But I've worked my whole life in technology. But that doesn't mean I haven't found all of the skills that I learned useful, about critical thinking, about the ability to form a cogent argument, about how to defend a stance, when to change a stance, things like that. It was like Sam Altman or somebody at Open AI looking about how AI will make humanities degrees even less valuable. And then you have from the Anthropic side saying it's gonna make humanity degrees more valuable. And I definitely come down on like the Anthropic side, is like maybe the best users of AI as AI advances are gonna be like liberal arts majors, because a lot of the pressure, and very realistic pressure, particularly post 2008, has been like, move into STEM, not necessarily for your long-term career, but so that you can get your first job and start paying off your student loans. And those are the kind of execution-based skills that are under threat by AI.

Elyse

Yeah. And not actually the skills that help you succeed in the long run as a human.

Robin Cannon

No, they're like, can I get hired?

Elyse

Right.

Robin Cannon

In a difficult economic situation. Which is a very real and legitimate question to answer. But now AI is potentially pulling the rug out from under that even more than would otherwise have been in the long term. I think it's such an exciting space to speculate about and I think speculation even when you are wrong in which you're gonna be in a lot of cases, is really useful to do, because it means that we are preparing ourselves for that future ambiguity. So we should be speculating and arguing and having debates, those are important and useful debates to have.

Elyse

Yeah. I definitely think that some of those, oh, I hate this term, but soft skills are going to be the things that we're starting to see in interviews, because I don't care about your Figma skills anymore, or your React skills anymore, like I care about all kinds of other skills that you have. I agree. The debates that I see on LinkedIn are abysmal, um, and I think mostly they're generated by fear. But I think people get very entrenched in some particular stance. Oh, Figma to code, or code to Figma, and this is so valuable for me, this is such a game changer, without any of the nuance around why it might be a game changer. And I think we've talked about some of those things today. Like if you can't use some of these frontier tools, design with code tools, then the ability to go back and forth between canvas to code and see what happens actually can be really powerful or interesting for you. And I think anytime we get really like, too attached to a particular way that things are, or that they could be, because it's the only thing we understand—

Robin Cannon

Cause we, it's the only workflow we understand.

Elyse

Right.

Robin Cannon

I think that's the thing. And probably for the next year or two, knowing how to do that might be really important for your career. And after that it might be terrible. And it's a very legitimate fear. I, I think you can look at something like Figma in killing Sketch, killed a company like Invision, which was very reliant on its ability to work with Sketch, and to provide lots of services around Sketch. And so I think we don't know what those knock on effects are gonna be, but I think that yes, having a broader awareness and the ability to deal with ambiguity, but also understand that some of these AI tools you in being more of a generalist as well. I am now 10 years ago I was a hands-on coder and I was very productive, but I've not been in that space for the last 10 years. But I still have a lot of the broader architectural understanding and the ambiguities of code and how to effectively test code, which means I'm very well placed now to be able to take advantage of some of the things that Claude Code can do. And it's great for me right now because it means, I can now be a builder again. And things like that are really exciting and it's take advantage of some of these tools, dip your toe in areas that you haven't before, and maybe you'll find a passion for them.

Elyse

Yeah. There are so many skills that designers have and bring to the table, Figma and the high fidelity visual pixel pushing, I think is the least of them. The skills that really good designers have around understanding constraints, understanding the problem, understanding the user, understanding how things go together, being able to interpret a really challenging user workflow into something that you know can actually be functional in some kind of UI. All of that stuff has nothing to do with the tools that you use. So the last question that I wanna touch on is something that Noelle said in the previous episode where we were doing some 2026 trend encapsulation and predictions. Um, it's this idea that, design systems can't compete on efficiency anymore, and AI is really owning the idea of efficiency, and I think really winning that. And so I think what a design system brings to the table now is something in this space of excellence, quality, consistency, like some of these other things that we've been talking about. But I would love your take on that as we're thinking about designing in the medium, designing with the real thing, what do you see as the story or the narrative around design systems and their place in this ecosystem?

Robin Cannon

I think if you didn't need good design systems and genuinely opinionated design systems before, you really do now, because it's the only way to place some kind of limit on slop. It is the primary context that any AI tool is gonna need to understand your brand, your team, your stance, at a basic level, your company's judgment and decisions about the way things should be presented and the way things work. It's the only way to prevent entropy in everything that you create, because if you are creating as fast as AI, then without some kind of contextual intelligence and some kind of control plane, you are gonna get massive drift very quickly.

Elyse

Absolutely.

Robin Cannon

I talk about design systems being a contractual relationship, here is our intent, here is our stance, not just an aggregation of our stuff. And I think that's really important. And Knapsack we talk about what we're trying to really build is some kind of intelligent product engine, in the idea that, this is something that delivers digital product, but in, in an effective and intelligent way that understands that scope and understands that context and understands that contract.

Elyse

Yeah. I love that. It is time for the best question on this podcast, robin, wrap us up, let's finish the episode. What is a spicy take that you have on design systems? And I'm gonna go ahead and bring that out all the way to designing with AI or designing with code. So hit us with a spicy take. Oh, you've given me a

Robin Cannon

much, much broader scope of potentially spicy takes!. I talked about this just a moment ago. Design systems are about preventing entropy. They are not about innovation. They're about preventing the drift in a company, in the designs that go out there, in the products that go out there. And if you reduce that drift, then humans can innovate, but deisgn systems themselves are not innovative.

Elyse

Yes. Yeah. And I think this touches back on oh, the design system limits my creativity, which is always an argument I found to be very frustrating because the design system was never like a creativity tool.

Robin Cannon

But like, constraints are what inspire creativity. Language is a constraint that we use to tell stories. Photography is one constrained method of creating visual stories. Honestly, they're all constraints about how we tell a story, in one way or the other. we're just crafting narratives within different constraints, and a design system is another constraint that should hopefully inspire us to tell narratives in creative ways, in the right ways for the the purpose of that product.

Elyse

I love that. Robin, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, sharing your thoughts. I know that there's a lot of fear, uncertainty, doubt about the future right now, but you know, some of the things that we've been talking about today I am genuinely really excited about. So thank you for sharing that vision and helping make it real. I think that we can do a lot to see that reality come true within companies that we work for Listeners, all of you too, like changing the way that you work in a way that's really positive for humans and, not just like rolling over and being like this sucks. So thank you for sharing that positivity and optimism and spending your time with us.

Robin Cannon

Yeah, it, I think it is a very exciting time. It is uncertain, but I do look out upon it optimistically.

Elyse

Thanks for listening to On Theme. 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!