 and then it's seen without the recording that I'd see. My mission to have a little bit of understanding. Yeah. The new thing is to go on top in the back of the story. I click the webcam because I'm using my webcam. I don't take the webcam because I'm going to stream it. I'm not using screen sharing. It's maybe that large. It would be cool to click if you can read slides. And it would be nice if somebody could confirm that it's working and that you're hearing me correctly. And if the technical things are out of the way, we can get started. OK. Your quality is perfect. But I don't know what to do about it. Start the audio. If it's very annoying, so without it for a second. Is this better? OK. So I'm trying with the AirPods. Maybe this is better. All right. OK. Thank you, Apple. So I'm going to share my screen again. So it helps to click the blue button on the top right of the slide. And then you can see the presentation in full. And with all of those audio problems out of the way, we can get started. My session is called Success Through Openness in Design. And my name is Johan. I'm a designer. I work for a company called Mono, also known as Mono Company on Twitter. And we are a small design studio. We are seven people strong. And we've been around for seven years. We design digital products and services. And it looks like the work we do on the left side, you can see a video editing application on the right side. You can see a planner application for schools to plan their lessons. And I sometimes jokingly say that all I do every day is draw boxes and arrows and connect things together. As a designer, I'm always thinking about where should the button go? What is the content of the screen? How do you go from screen to screen? And I find that overall, the last few years, the overall quality of software and digital experience has been getting much better. So if you're Belgian and you have to do your taxes, you might remember the screen on the left, which is the EID middleware. And it was a terrible experience to log into the federal government, your EID. And now things have gone better through It's Me. And I think overall, the last few years, there's been like a big baseline quality improvement in design. So the general level of things that are being put out there is much bigger. And firms, companies have also decided to share their design more. So on the top left, you can see IBM's Carbon Design System. On the bottom right, you can see Shopify's Polaris Design System. And these companies have decided to share their code publicly, to share their design system publicly, so that anyone can access it, learn from it, and maybe use some of it in their own work, either as inspiration or sometimes completely with very permissive licenses. As a designer, I always encounter specific problems. For example, a few weeks ago, I was working on a system where it was about days. So I had to find a way to ask someone for their birth date. And this is a similar pattern on Gov.UK, where they asked the question, when was your passport issued? So you see that the design solution that they have is to ask for day, month, and year in three separate fields. Now, there are so many ways you can tackle this problem. If you look at how other companies did it, like for example, LinkedIn, they have this very complex picker where you can pick between first the range of dates, and then depending on the range of dates, you will also get a double date picker. So the question is, what is the best pattern at the right time? And as a designer, I am immensely thankful to have all of these design systems out there that I can reference and check their research. I am also big on sharing myself as a designer. On the bottom right, you can see a photo from a design systems event that we held in Ghent. You know, and we could still hold real life events. And on the top left, you can see my GitHub profile where I post a lot of open source projects and things that I'm playing with. And I think I like this sharing because it allows me to learn. From others, it gets me into a conversation with others. And I strongly believe that work becomes better when it's discussed. So when there are multiple eyes on a problem, when there are many people discussing something, that's when work can get much better. And there's a certain evolution in the sharing of work. We had open source code for a long time, but now there's also more and more design being shared. One of my favorite apps is called Figma. So that's the app icon for one of my favorite design apps, Figma. They decided that it's super important to focus on community. So Figma, it's an application that you can use to design things. It's like Photoshop or Sketch. You can use it to design, but you can design together. So it's a bit like Google Docs. But for design, if you've used Miro, Miro the platform, it's similar, but it's more like a professional design tool where you can work together. But Figma decided that community is so important that they made it one of their pillars for their product design last year. Focusing hugely on community and sharing of design, remixing other designs work. And whenever you publish something on the Figma community, you do it with a permissive license, so a Creative Commons license, CC by Attribute, for those who know their C license. And it means that whenever you share something, that others can use it as long as they credit you. And we've also been publishing as a company some design things on our Ad Mono account. And for now, we've published mono icons. We've published mono devices, which are device frames, and another resource. And I think the sharing of design is so important. So maybe for those who don't know what a design system is, because I'm talking design system here, design system there, and you might wonder what is it talking about? What is a design system? It's a cohesive set of principles, design patterns, and guidelines that allow people to work together, to work on digital experiences. So for example, the people at IBM, so that's the top left, or the people at Shopify, that's the bottom right. They have this documentation website that tens, hundreds of people maybe worked on together to unify what a Shopify app looks like, or what does an IBM app look like. And it doesn't, it's not only private companies that do this, governments do it as well. In the Netherlands, there is projects that is starting, that it's about starting a Netherlands design system. So if the Dutch government has to make an application, what does it look like? How would it work? It's an early phase. This is a website to promote the idea. And on this slide, you can see a previous version of the design. This is not what it's going to be in the end. It's one of the projects that started the idea of why don't we take this work, and why don't we share it with a wider community. What they did was set up a slide where they are discussing the design system, and the community is quite active holding round tables and events and talking to each other to try and figure out how to do this. I think that's quite interesting. And it reminds me a lot of the Gov.UK design system. So Gov.UK, the redesign of Gov.UK is about 10 years old. 2011, they launched this website. And if you compare it to in Belgium, it's a bit comparable to the Vlandro.be website or federallevelbelgium.be website. So you go there to get information about your passport, about driver's license, about life stuff. And then on the right side of this slide, you can see the homepage for the Gov.UK design system. So from that project, a design system was born, which is now used to power a lot of government projects in the UK. So I think they are quite good when it comes to implementing a government-wide design system in the UK. And the team behind this is called the GDS Government Digital Service. And they have been quite prolific in sharing everything that they learn. So they built up a community. They have a lot of blog posts. I remember a time when someone from GDS came to speak in Antwerp and to promote what they learned as a group about the government lens of a design system, about how to do this in general. And I think what they achieved is brilliant. They unified over 2,000 websites with a different look, a different experience to use the GDS-made design system, so the Gov.UK design system. And if you look a bit deeper, it's really cool what they do. So for example, if you look into a design pattern or a component, they have a cookie banner. I don't like cookie banners, so it's just an example. But if you look at how they do things, I think it's quite mature. They have a design page about the cookie banner, where it says that in this case that it's an experimental component. You can get the code there. You can get the design for that component there. But there is also like a whole GitHub discussion about that component. So if you want to know why the design is the way it is, you can read the whole discussion on GitHub, which is I took the screenshots more than 20 pages long, if you would print it out. And that's all the research that people put behind this, all the opinions on the page. So the evolution of the design is effectively being tracked. And this prevents people from reinventing the wheel all over again. Based on the research, you get to a pattern. The pattern gets validated. Through testing, usability testing, user testing, and through community discussion. And then this pattern is ready to get shared with a wider audience. But I want to bring this back to Belgium. In Belgium, I think there are a lot of strong open source initiatives in the development world. But if it comes to design, there's not that many in the development world. There's FOSTA, a yearly conference about open source initiatives. There's Drupal, which was founded by a Belgian. There are initiatives like Open Summer of Code and Apps for Gent. There's an upcoming initiative from the government about working with solid and data faults. But if I look at design or open design initiatives in Belgium, there are initiatives. And I think that's a bit of a shame if you look at where things are going. We're going with a review plan from Europe, where we're going politics-wise with the plans from the federal government about making things more digital. Then I think we have a lot of work on the table. So my proposal would be to take a queue from Gov.uk and also from the Dutch people who already started their project and think about maybe we should create a Belgian design system. And one Sunday I was very ambitious, I think. I just started creating it. I made a proof-of-concept for the federal level brand guidelines in Belgium. So that was the start because I thought, first we need the brand, right? And I was a bit overly ambitious, I think. I worked on it a few hours and realized that this is not going to be a big job. But I looked at the logo, I don't like this logo. Maybe we should change it. And then I looked at the InfoCorona virus website and I was like, why is the line length so long and what is that ugly banner doing there? We should really focus a bit more and work on the typography and try to take my designer's eye and look at things and think about where we could go. And this is by no means a finished work, of course. You can see there's a lot of placeholders and it's really a start, it's really nothing. It's only a couple of hours of work. But I quickly realized that this is not a weakened project. This is a community effort and this is something that we will have to do together with the whole of Belgium. So it reminded me of this proverb, if you want to go fast, go along. If you want to go far, go together. So I believe that we need to work on putting more design out in the open, whether it's government or from private companies. And this open design documentation will really help us forward to increase the level of design in Belgium. I want to talk about community models so that we can have a wider community that contributes to a bigger system like the Gov.uk. I would like that people think about reusability, that we don't reinvent the wheel all the time and that we think about reusable components that are accessible, that are performance, that people can take from a system and that they don't have to start from scratch anymore. A final point I want to make is that I think taxpayer money, public money should lead to public good, where I believe at the moment not enough of the work that we're doing is being shared out in the open even though it's paid by public money. So I have a question for the whole audience. Next up, there's going to be some discussion where I also have some questions for you. But in general, I think my message is what are we waiting for? Let's make a Belgian design system and let's make it awesome. Thanks. Okay. So these are my slides. And now I can invite everyone to connect their audio if they want to, maybe ask it. You have to set up something for that. And I... Everyone should be able to connect with the audio. All right. Cool. I hope you enjoyed the presentation. And if you want to say something, don't be shy. Let's get the conversation started to talk about design. You can also put on your webcam if you want. That's a feature, right? Astrid? Yes, but I will enable that right now. Cool. So audio or video you can choose. And if you have a comment about the presentation, that would be welcome. Or an answer to the question here, how can we encourage sharing design across companies and organizations? That's the first thing that I'm wondering like why don't people share their designs more for us? Encourage that sharing. In order to say something, you have to unmute yourself. It's the first button in the row where you have the microphone. And if you are too shy, you can also put your question in the chat. I am wondering, Johan, what do you think are the main obstacles for people not sharing or for a Belgian open design system? So that's actually my further point. I think main obstacles for a Belgian design system are that there are different levels. So federal, regional level. And they have to work together. So that's a Belgian problem. But I thought about it and actually every country has this problem in the UK. There are different parts of the UK, Wales, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland. So, I mean, they did it. And then in Dutch, in the Netherlands, there's also the REX overhead and then the local governments, different levels. I think different levels are the main problem. Another problem I think is that people don't really value design that much. So it's a bit of an unknown that we should invest in it. That's also something. Thanks. I see that Anton and Dieter connected to their audio. Maybe they want to ask a question. Hi. I'm not sure if you can hear me, right? Yes. All right. Perfect. First of all, great presentation. Thanks a lot. I have a question. Where do we sign up? I am jokingly, of course, but no, I think it's a really nice initiative. I was also, I had a question because you mentioned there are a lot of design systems out there. A lot of big companies, tech companies, publish their own design system. What would make a Belgian design system, a Belgian design system, for example, if the UK has a great system, maybe why not borrow their design system, for example? Maybe it's a bit of a hypothetical question but maybe something to, what would make Belgium's design system unique in a way is perhaps my question. I think if you look at it objectively, there are good parts to the UK design system but if you copy-paste it, you don't have anything yet because I think what we need to do is work on a wider community that uses the same system. So the real product is the wider community that uses the system. It's not about that. I had my Sunday experiment there and it's not about the perfect design file. I could theoretically work on it for six months and come up with the perfect design but it's worth nothing if it's shared and it should also be built together. So people in the Netherlands, I had a chat with someone, they really thought about this and they already went through that route of making the perfect thing on their own but they realized it's more like a community effort and that agencies, different parts of the government, they have to get on board with this community effort. First, it doesn't matter if you have a perfect system, it's more about creating a system together and then it's becoming a viable thing. I agree. I think that's the biggest hurdle. Thanks. All right, cool. Does anybody else want to ask a question or chime in with their esteemed question? Hi. Hi. There's something I'm wondering and I've talked about it a lot. We talk about design systems and most of the things we see are actually like component libraries and like UI kits. I think it's more interesting to think about the design system as the governance and the community, especially if you talk about something like a Belgium design system but how would you like organize that? Is there somebody maintaining the community? Who's an elite? That's mostly my question. I think it's quite an interesting question. It's also the most difficult question, to do it. I showed a bit of governance stuff with the GitHub issues where the cookie banner was being discussed but I think it's much wider than opening it up code-wise or design-file-wise. There's going to need to do community events. There's going to need to be people who are backing it up and who think within their professional position putting time into it makes sense. I think if people realize that over a longer period we will invest in a Belgium design system as a group or like a good Flemish design system, a good Wadoen design system, then we can really go further and having those conversations, talking to each other about it, using it and sharing. Perhaps already starting with sharing things more publicly when we do work can already help. I think the governance aspect and who is in the lead is quite a difficult one. Ideally it gets decided top-down by the government themselves that they want to invest in it. But another way it could happen is that it's bottom-up that enough people decide that it's a good idea and a good result could then be over there how to say this could then be it could be used as a base for the real Belgium design system because there was already a community effort. That's the two approaches that I'm thinking about. I think the bottom-up is interesting. The community is missing, I guess. I wonder how we can create it without somebody from the government leading it. Because there's already some sort of design system or component library. It's very close. Maybe if you can show an example of how it could be done. It would be interesting. I have another question but maybe somebody else wants to. Maybe I'm going to answer Raphael's question first. He says, don't have mic access. Let's say we end up with a very solid system worked on by lots of designers. How easily do you think it will translate to government use? I think it will be a real challenge. And not super clear on what the question is there. But getting a system adopted, I think that's the question. Getting it adopted for real. That's going to be the real challenge because you can make a system but you have to work on adoption. One difficulty is that everyone has their own needs. Maybe there are already requirements in place that different people want. You have differences between local government and regional government and federal government. They all have different requirements. So working together and finding a way to maybe have variants of the same system that will be a challenge. But I think if we get it started we can improve the overall quality of the websites that we visit. If you now visit the financials website from the federal government or the one from public health or coronavirus they are all different and I think it's good work if they all start from the same idea, the same design system. If anybody else has a question I'm just going to wait 20 seconds and then later you can take a question if nobody responds if that's all right. So no new people are coming in with a question later if you want. Go ahead. I'll try to follow up with Rafael's question wise. Regarding adoption of design like the components because everybody has different needs it will be difficult to align like there's lots of opinions like how could we get along building different versions of things that still have like sharing those things. Somebody needs a very complex upload field for example another one is a very simple one like size applications will change so I'm thinking maybe towards something like Spotify does with their approach I wonder what your thoughts are. I think there's different needs there's content website needs there are application like needs there's also something in between which is like where you maybe register for a driver's license so that's like a usable form on a website and I think you will need variants of your design system for those let's say the backend type of app where you have a lot of data entry and where you are working in every day it will look different and a public website which is about information and it will look slightly different from a form type website where you have to where you're interacting with a service online so I think all of those can be split up into different design systems if you look at Shopify they realized pretty quickly that they have a design system for the back office of the shops but they also have a separate design system for the point of sale for mobile so I don't think one design system is the answer but sharing of design systems definitely is the answer so if it's closed closed source if it's locked behind doors then nobody can remix it nobody can take inspiration from it so I think to make it more like a natural evolution let's say somebody makes an app for the federal government and they happen to make a design system while creating it why don't they put it online publicly and share that idea with other people who are working with federal government it's maybe a bit idealistic that they could merge the two code base or use the same design logic as a base but I think maybe if people start doing it it could something could start that's what I'm thinking alright so that's all about belgium design system maybe I want to take it a bit broader and talk about how open design could help in belgium maybe people are working in a specific field where it would help if there is more open design so if anybody has a comment on this one feel free to let me know and then we can discuss it for me personally the icons that you published with mono were already super interesting and I use I forgot the name of the tool for icons with these kinds of open design it's really useful for at least my work with an open knowledge belgium and as a non designer so that's more like free assets that you can use which are helpful right so Tor has a comment a non design example on the bottom on the bottom up approach right very interesting I'll definitely read that article so maybe people are working in different fields medical government something else and if you have any idea about maybe how design is opening up within your space if you have a comment about it feel free to in the chat if there's a general question about the other three topics how can we make belgium design system a reality or the one that has not been on the screen so far much how can we encourage sharing and design across companies and organizations they are welcome we'll be closing the session in eight minutes or if there are no more questions we will just stop it here so I'm just going to give it a few moments if somebody wants to say something I will take that as a no so I want to thank everyone for attending the session I hope that I'm inspiring a little bit to start this idea of a belgium design system I hope that people will maybe think about okay I have this project here why don't I put the source code on github I have this design file here in Figma why don't I share it on the community page on Figma Astrid if you want to you can also take over and talk about open belgium in the coming sessions but if if we're closing in town I hope people will get some inspiration from this to maybe if we can get back together physically maybe we should have a hack day Anton you asked how can we sign up there's no sign up yet but I hope that the idea becomes something that people start thinking about and I can just refer to our website openbelgium.be where you can see the full program and you can still sign up for all the other sessions and thank you everyone for joining this session and I hope to see you at the later one as well and I see that you're recording that