Auðbergur Gíslason - Design Systems in the Public Sector

Auðbergur Gíslason is a design system manager in charge of the uniformity of all of the web design for the city of Reykjavík. The challenges are multiple as in the public sector it's not just about being beautiful or driving sales. It's about being highly functional for 99% of the population and accessible to the 1% that is left. Our journey at the City of Reykjavík has been bumpy. The system was created by an agency and then implemented fairly fast. We've since then had to restructure the system completely from the bottom up in order to make sure things are correct going forward. When creating a large design system it's easy to ignore a faulty foundation and start building on top of it, rendering the work broken, resulting in great costs. As the capital of Iceland, a public organization, the benefit of having a functioning, uniform design system is immence financially, accessability-wise and service-wise for the citizens.