Interesting topic from a recent @autogram_is chat: One of the best scenes from The Devil Wears Prada is Miranda’s monologue about high fashion eventually finding its way down to the masses as ready-to-wear, even if the consumer market doesn’t recognize the roots.
In a lot of ways, the same cycle can be obseved in content and design systems work. Large orgs (or cutting-edge practitioners) push the boundaries with new tools, techniques, and approaches that are impractical for most projects and individuals.
Sometimes those approaches stay niche — only a small handful ever encounter the problems they were meant to solve, or they require a scale that’s out of reach for 99% of the digital world.
But often, those ways of understanding certain problems, ways of solving them, and tools that accrue around those ways? They make their way from “exotic” to “production class” to “best practice” to “commodity product,” eventually shaping The Way Things Work™
(Or, in the case of Miranda’s monologue, the fact that you can get an off-the-shelf sweater in cerulean this season)
A lot of the shifts in web/digital product and content development we’re seeing at the casual pro/small org level are the productization of bleeding edge bespoke work from 10, 15 years ago. It takes a long time for models+tools to mature.
And — this is of particular interest to us right now — sometimes that means that the more accessible, productized approaches are in the hands of a large audience before all the maturing has been done. When there are still bugs to shake out or edge cases unsolved.
There’s nothing wrong with it, but it can lead smaller orgs to spend on best practices, invest time in tooling up… then fail to realize the promised results. Lacking deep in-house expertise, the can’t distinguish between “the system is insufficient” and “we’re doing it wrong”