Last week, former Google VP, Design and Material Design leader Itai Vonshak published an article called The Broken Promises of Design Systems; Why Following the Rules Won’t get you to Great Products. In it, he outlines his perspective on how “design systems have failed us.”

There’s certainly truth in the article. Design systems at many organizations have become a tautology as opposed to a means to an end—innovative design at scale.

Several passages in the article reveal where this train of thought may have come from:

Any design system professional will tell you that they spend more time trying to convince people to adopt their design system than actually designing it.

In my experience, design systems aren’t really meant to be designed. Products and features are meant to be designed, and a design system is the emergent connection among a recognized redundancy of interface elements found in those products and features. Design systems exist as a by-product of a product design process, not an independent initiative and certainly not a precursor to product design work.

The promise of design systems was alluring: accelerate the process of building cohesive experiences, ensuring high quality and consistency at scale. We envisioned systems that encompassed patterns, components, motion, content strategy, and even micro-interactions. A holistic guide to creating delightful experiences.

That wasn’t the promise at all. Design systems aren’t an instruction manual. They’re a history book, a farmer’s almanac of sorts for any given digital organization. It‘s the collection of stories of how product has gotten made, initially without judgment about right or wrong ways while still constantly striving for what’s increasingly ideal. Sometimes, that history book contains cautionary tales; other times, it hints at aspirational approaches that moves an organization’s user interface work forward.

This is why I’ve historically encouraged others away from using Material Design, Bootstrap, and other “off-the-shelf” design system products to design and build their interfaces. It’s not that those products are shoddy; on the contrary, they’re some of the smartest and most thoughtfully crafted systems out there. But they don’t contain institutional knowledge about your organization, so, at best, they’re generic building blocks… enough to get you up and running, but certainly not the ingredients that lead to innovation.

Instead of blaming design systems for breaking their promises, perhaps we might reassess our expectations of them.