ORGANIZING A DESIGN SYSTEM VIA FOLKSONOMY

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

Design systems often rely on rigid hierarchies that clash with users' mental models, limiting adoption. A better approach is using folksonomies—user-created tags like Gmail labels or hashtags—which allow flexible, intuitive organization. This encourages collaboration and discovery, though it needs identity, moderation, and curation. Unlike AI classifiers, folksonomies reflect human intent and meaning.