Ben
Callahan
Friday, October 31
Marriot Royal,
Bristol, UK
Design System Culture Mapping: Turning Resistance Into Momentum
If you’ve ever felt like you’re swimming against the current of your organization, this workshop is for you.
Design systems are much more than tokens, components and code libraries. While the technical and creative assets are essential, there’s an often overlooked force that shapes their success: culture.
Whether it’s the culture of your broader organization or the subculture within your design system team, the relationship between the two has a direct impact on how your system is built, adopted, and sustained. When these cultural forces are misaligned, even the most well-crafted systems struggle to gain traction.
This full-day workshop will pull back the curtain on how culture impacts a design system program, and give you the tools to assess and adapt your approach accordingly.
Who should attend
This workshop is designed for anyone working on or around design systems who:
- Feels like they’re constantly running into resistance
- Wants to improve system adoption and alignment
- Is navigating complex organizational dynamics
- Leads or supports a design system team
- Works in product, UX, engineering, or design operations
What you'll do
Throughout the day, you'll engage in conversation, reflection, and practical activities designed to equip you with real skills:
- Spot the Signs: Learn how to identify cultural signals in teams’ behaviors and language
- See It in Action: Watch Ben conduct a live cultural assessment
- Practice the Process: Run your own cultural analysis using a structured framework
What you'll learn
You’ll gain a deep understanding of:
- The different types of organizational cultures
- How culture impacts the success or failure of systematic efforts
- Why some teams experience constant friction—and how to address it
- How to move your processes from a series of steps to a spectrum of ways of working
What you'll leave with
By the end of the workshop, you’ll be able to:
- Assess your personal cultural leaning
- Assess your design system team’s cultural dynamics
- Assess your organization’s broader cultural landscape
- Identify process changes to reduce friction and improve alignment
- Apply a lightweight Google Sheets-based tool to run future assessments
Design systems don’t exist in a vacuum—they reflect, amplify, and sometimes challenge the culture they live in. When done well, they help scale healthy patterns. When done without cultural awareness, they invite resistance and stall progress.
This workshop will give you the insight and confidence to navigate the human side of systems—and to lead your design system with more empathy, clarity, and impact.
We won’t be designing in Figma.
We won’t be writing code.
We will be using spreadsheets.
We will be learning from each other.
And we will have fun doing it.