Two years ago I broke up with Design and moved in with Product Management. But like a bitter, toxic ex I still cannot stop talking about Design.

Hi, I’m Maria.

This is where I vent about Design Systems, Design Thinking and Systems Thinking. So buckle up for a storm of pattern pandemonium, a spark of creative combustion, and a stream of systems-specific sagacity —all peppered with an occasional sprinkle of vitriol.

From my latest blog post:

Ah, Christopher Alexander. In the 1970s, before we cluttered our Figma files with auto-layout and bent our brains around component properties, he noticed something beautifully simple: good design patterns emerge like desire paths in a garden —worn into existence by repeated human use. Fast forward through decades of designers discovering and rediscovering this insight, and his ideas have spawned our modern Design Systems, the latest in humanity's relentless (and somewhat questionable) obsession with creating universal languages.

Like Esperanto aiming for a universal grammar, Univers dreaming of systematic typography, and Helvetica trying to wrangle New York's subway chaos into neat, navigable patterns (thanks, Vignelli), Design Systems represent our stubborn attempt to systematize chaos into neat, reusable patterns, each of which is supposed to spark joy.