Design Systems, a force for Sustainability
New Business Manager
Design Team Lead
4 minute read
Design systems aren't just about consistency and efficiency, they also play a key role in sustainable digital practices. By centralising reusable components and guidelines, they reduce duplication and streamline development, which in turn lowers energy use and digital waste. As we increasingly assess the carbon impact of our digital choices, design systems emerge as a powerful, often overlooked tool for building greener digital products.
In the drive toward more sustainable digital practices, design systems play a powerful, and often underappreciated, role.
A design system provides a centralised collection of reusable components, design principles, and guidelines that enable teams to create digital products more efficiently and consistently. While their core purpose is to support scalability and cohesion across digital services, design systems also contribute meaningfully to environmental sustainability.
If you’ve worked in digital for a while, chances are you’ve bumped into a design system. Whether it’s the GOV.UK Design System, NHS Frontend, or something homegrown in a Figma file called “COMPONENT LIBRARY – FINAL FINAL (use this one!!!)”, these systems help teams build digital products and services faster and more consistently.
In a world where we’re (rightly) scrutinising the carbon impact of digital systems, from the servers hosting our websites to the energy it takes to load a page on someone’s phone, its logical to assess the positive impact that a design system can make.
Reducing waste through reuse
Design systems help minimise duplication of effort and improves collaboration between teams A shared design system creates a common language between designers, developers, content teams, and stakeholders. This reduces duplication, misunderstandings, and the need for repeated clarification. Fewer design iterations, fewer lines of new code, and fewer deployments all contribute to a more efficient and sustainable workflow.
Design Systems are good for the planet.
When they’re used well, they reduce unnecessary duplication. Less time is spent in meetings, on revisions, or rewriting code — all of which cuts down on the energy, time, and human effort involved in delivering and maintaining digital services. For developers, that means writing less new code and making better use of existing, tested components. All of that adds up to lower energy consumption.
Improving performance and efficiency
Optimised, reusable components typically result in cleaner, more efficient code, as components and assets are stored and managed locally. This has a direct impact on performance, leading to lighter interfaces and faster load times which of course, reduces energy consumption for both end users and servers. As the digital industry’s environmental impact continues to grow, performance improvements like these are a critical part of lowering digital carbon emissions.
When an organisation has a comprehensive design system, it empowers them to move fast, and respond to any market changes or emerging needs. This may be especially important in sectors such as Health and Life Sciences, Manufacturing and Government, where there is a need for rapid innovation and delivery.
Supporting Long-Term maintainability
Design systems make digital products easier to maintain, update, and scale over time. By creating a consistent, accessible foundation, teams can extend the lifespan of digital services, reducing the need for frequent redesigns or full rebuilds, both of which can be resource intensive.
Embedding accessibility and inclusion from inception
A mature design system often embeds accessibility and inclusive design principles from the outset. This ensures best practice is consistently applied and reduces the cost and complexity of retrofitting inclusive features later. In turn, this supports social sustainability, creating digital services that work for everyone, especially those often excluded.
A more sustainable approach to design isn’t just about colour contrast and accessibility (though, obviously, we care a lot about those too). It’s also about the systems and workflows we use to build digital services in the first place.
In summary
Sustainable design is systemic.
When we invest in systems thinking, not just in how services look, but in how they’re built and maintained, we create digital experiences that are not only more effective, but more sustainable in the long term.
Design systems help us:
• Avoid starting from scratch every time, and improving consistency across a digital product or service
• Improve performance (smaller, cleaner frontends = less data to transfer)
• Encourage inclusive design from the start
• Extend the lifespan of digital services by making them easier to maintain
We think there’s something quietly radical about that.
In our work, we’ve seen teams wrestle with clunky systems, duplicated effort, and decisions made in silos. Similarly, we’ve seen the transformation that happens when we collaborate to create a shared design language, not just in the look and feel, but in the culture. People talk more. They borrow ideas. They reuse, recycle, and rethink.
Sustainability isn’t just a checkbox or a reporting metric. It’s a mindset. And design systems, in their own quiet way, help us get there.
If you’re looking to develop or assess a design system with sustainability in mind, we’d love to help. Get in touch to find out more about our approach to responsible, scalable digital design.