Components designed in isolation break in context — the parts-and-wholes problem¶
Insight: Components designed and specified in isolation inevitably encounter problems when integrated into the larger application context. A "face pile" component (showing active users in a collaborative app) had detailed specs for sizes, colors, and edge cases — but questions about placement, responsive behavior, multi-session users, server errors, and testing could only be answered in context. This is a fundamental tension in design engineering: the desire for modular, reusable parts vs. the reality that meaning emerges from the whole.
Detail: Voisen (Design Engineering lead at Adobe) draws on philosophical phenomenology to argue that the parts-and-wholes relationship is not a bug to be fixed but a fundamental property of design engineering work. The practical implication: design systems and component libraries are useful abstractions, but they always require contextual adaptation. This argues against the dream of fully automated component generation — context will always require human judgment about how parts relate to wholes.
Sources
- Sean Voisen — "Parts and wholes and moments, oh my!" (2025-09-20)