Explore the unique parallels between urban planning and design systems with Andii Hei. Discover how cities and digital landscapes share principles of structure, adaptability, and creative constraints. Andii offers insights into how these connections reveal new ways to think about system design, collaboration, and the evolution of digital experiences. Whether you're building cityscapes or digital ecosystems, this episode uncovers the essential blueprint for effective design.
Guest
Andii Hei is a Senior Product Designer leading the transformation of Wesco's enterprise design system, Synergy. A lifelong learner with a zeal for interdisciplinary thinking, often drawing inspiration from diverse fields like the built environment, linguistics, and philosophy.
Transcript
Chris Strahl [00:00:00]:
Hi, and welcome to the Design Systems Podcast. This podcast is about the place where design and development overlap. We talk with experts to get their point of view about trends in design code and how it relates to the world around us. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Knapsack. Check us out at knapsack.cloud. If you want to get in touch with the show, ask some questions, or generally tell us what you think, Go ahead and tweet us at thedspod. We'd love to hear from you.
Welcome to the Design System Podcast. Today I'm here with Andii Hai. Andii, it's great to have you on the program. When we met, you were at Hills Pet. Now you're about to be a senior designer at Westcode. So really excited to have you on. I wanted to talk about the first time that
I ran into you. We were in New York City in a Weinbard an event, and you came in and there were a bunch of other different design executives, design leaders in the room, and you were just popping off about all the problems with design systems. And I love that energy in that take that you bring. So tell me about, like, how you feel about this entire systems concept, because I think it's an interesting background.
Andii Hei [00:01:03]:
I started design, like, when ux was barely nascent in the industry, and there was not a lot of rationale. It was still driven by, like, how we feel about how things look and feel.
Chris Strahl [00:01:16]:
Yeah, all the colors of the rainbow and make it pretty and stuff like that.
Andii Hei [00:01:19]:
Exactly. Yep, yep. But we reached that point, and I know that windows eight was a complete bloody disaster, but the guy that was presenting it, Stephen Sienofsky, was like rattling off like, how all of these metrics, how all of these data points pointed out, like, no, this is the best solution that we can do. Now, taking aside the qualitative feedback that came back from it, that for me, inspired to go, oh, I really love this. I've always wanted to design stuff, and the way that my mind works, which is data driven, led me to like, go, right, that's the field I want to be in. I want to do ux design.
Chris Strahl [00:01:56]:
This is hilarious, right? Because my friends that know me, and I rarely admit this, I can't believe I'm admitting this on the podcast. I own Windows Phone, and the reason why I owned a Windows Phone was because of the UI consistency between applications. Like, I love the fact that I could open any app on a Windows Phone, and it was like every other app in terms of user experience. And that consistency of experience was mind blowingly valuable to me. And of course, like the Windows Phone was a massive failure and like it was all tried to link to Windows eight and this whole entire thing like that. But the interesting idea about that is that was what like Microsoft experimented with in terms of experience, innovation. Now granted, I think they picked the wrong experience, but at the same time there was some brilliance and beauty in that that I think is often overlooked. So to hear you bring that up just like warms me to my core at some bizarre, embarrassing level.
Andii Hei [00:02:49]:
I also love the fact that, oh, you guys have brought in flat design to the world. I can do flat design. A, I was never a fan of like those shiny button gradients anyway, right?
Chris Strahl [00:03:01]:
Yeah, everything looks wet.
Andii Hei [00:03:03]:
Exactly. But also b, and this is a bit embarrassing to admit, but I've always, never been great at it. I'm glad that flat design came in so that like, oh, I no longer need to do this. Okay, great.
Chris Strahl [00:03:15]:
That whole like wet, shiny design thing, it always reminds me, you remember like when everybody was doing selfies back in the early like two thousand ten s and it was all duck face. Yes. Like that whole like shiny, like beveled, wet look with like a weird drop shadow that always just reminds me of like, it's like the duck face selfie of design.
Andii Hei [00:03:36]:
You know what's depressing is that if you go into like a lot of Uis for car dashboards, they still are into that shiny look, skeuomorphic look. And it's almost as if, like, guys, what are you doing? It's a screen. Why are you trying to make your screen look like a knob on your, like all the other physical buttons? It's a digital control. Just keep it digital, make it look digital.
Chris Strahl [00:04:01]:
So the idea is like you come from this background where like you're like, okay, so the way we thought about print to digital, the way we thought about all this different structure where we paint with all the colors of the rainbow, do all this different stuff. There's no structure to it. And you like the structure?
Andii Hei [00:04:17]:
Yes. So that's where atomic design comes in. That's where design systems comes in. And I'm like, oh man, thank you, Brad Foss. So with that in mind, I was always trying to figure out like surely I can't just make a random bunch of like Ui elements and just use them willy nilly and just go like, oh, well, that looks good. It sort of like looks like the other thing over there. Yeah, I guess it must work that way. That atomic design theory and then design systems that followed shortly afterwards, basically gave me like a framework for which like, ah, yes, I could build it systematically.
I could make it like a tool shop where I can like build a sort of like a small machine or a small widget that in turn can be clustered together, assembled together and turned into a bigger machine. And I was like, huh, that sounds familiar. That sounds pretty much like what craftsman used to do. And then they basically got pulled into the industrial revolution. It became factory workers. Now, I know that doesn't sound like a great image for a lot of designers. Oh my God, I'm losing my artistic freedom. I'm going to become a factory worker.
But hang on a second, this actually does allow you to have a lot more freedom, despite the fact that, oh, the thing that you think that is going to be expressive in your design can now become a little bit more functional or a little bit more considered. And a lot of those considerations that you probably may have missed in the initial design phases or later design phases now gets taken care of because we have all of these parts, these components that have already taken care of the load.
Chris Strahl [00:05:53]:
Everybody, when they think about factory workers, they think about those old videos of people soullessly slaving away on an assembly line. I think that it's funny because a similar thing happened in front end development 15 years ago, where everybody realized that we were all writing procedural code and that if we just had functions, classes, methods, all the stuff that existed in desktop applications and object oriented coding, that the world would be a better place. Now your code is less unique because you're reusing pieces of it over and over and over again, but it's also a lot more functional. All of a sudden it appeals to a lot more people and you can build a lot more with it. Now we have states and JavaScript frameworks and all this other stuff like that, that do that load lifting for us. I was writing a strategy doc for Knapsack literally yesterday, and one of the things that I said is like, the power of design systems is this idea that we're transitioning from this world where everything has to be its own bespoke snowflake into something where you can say like, I've solved this problem before. Here's the way I solved it. Let me pick that up and reuse it again.
Andii Hei [00:07:07]:
For me, the design system is kind of like what Timothy Morton was basically saying, what he coined an hyper object.
Chris Strahl [00:07:16]:
Real quick, who is Timothy Morton?
Andii Hei [00:07:18]:
Okay, he's basically an environmental philosopher. And basically the reason why he came up with a term hyper object is because like he's trying to come up with a term like what are cities? This is just coming from a person who's joined design like a lot later than a lot of people, didn't take the traditional track. I studied business administration, and in my spare time I would have played Sim City until like, it was like 04:00 a.m. so a lot of these concepts come back to me in different ways. So when I saw the definition of what a hyper object is, I was like, that's a design system, because like a, a few of the characteristics is that like they're viscous, which means that they tend to stick to the entities that is associated with them. So you can think of it as like a library or a style sheet that is specifically like for a particular pattern. For example, they're not local, which means that their effects are globally distributed. So if you think about it, design systems usually live in a cloud, thanks to Figma and a lot of our GitHub code bases and stuff like that.
Andii Hei [00:08:19]:
They're phased, which means that only bits and pieces of them I experienced at any one time. So in our design systems world, a designer only experiences the design system inside Figma. A developer only experiences the design system in their code base. They rarely experience it all at once. You're not going to have all three panels up at the same time. Also, the last one is the inter objective, which means that they consist of many other entities, but they aren't reducible to them. Basically, it's greater than the sum of its parts, right?
Chris Strahl [00:08:53]:
A design system is not a component library, correct?
Andii Hei [00:08:55]:
A design system is more than just a component library that is linked up to the code base. No, no no, it's a whole ecosystem. It's just like cities. You can't just say cities. It's just a bunch of people and a bunch of buildings. No, no, no. A city is much more than that. You can't reduce it to just roads, buildings, people, and all of that other stuff.
Like, it's the relationships, the interconnectivity that actually makes it a system.
Chris Strahl [00:09:23]:
The interesting concept here, right, is if you think about what a city is or what a hyper object is, and then you think about it as it relates to a system which is ostensibly housed in a bunch of tools and code and designs, that ultimately affects an entire ecosystem for a big corporation, or maybe even beyond the walls of that corporation. And that's kind of what you're talking about when you say a design system is a hyper object is you're saying there's all these different attributes that work for this thing that ultimately affects a bunch of different people, both directly and indirectly.
Andii Hei [00:09:58]:
It's amazing. Like, when you look at what a company's digital landscape is and what a city does, they're not that different from each other, because a design system is essentially just like a manifestation of that digital landscape, right? Like, it's a reflection of how the company works, how it operates, and also, like, that sort of brings what their design language does as well.
Chris Strahl [00:10:24]:
So when you think about these cities that we create, these design system skylines, the crafting of that skyline is the thing that takes a lot of planning. And much like a city has urban planning and government and bureaucracy and all these other things that get stood up to both create it and maintain it. There's a lot of parallels between that and, like, actually how you build a system like this inside of a company. And I think that that collaboration and coordination, if you think about the similarities of a governor to, like, a design system owner, right. There's a lot of interesting ways you can go with this.
Andii Hei [00:11:03]:
Like, the mayor, for example, just trying to, like, oh, let's try to build that fancy park. What does that sound like in design systems world? That sounds to me like, well, someone had the bright idea to actually go build this, like, whole new feature in a particular tab of an app or something like that. Like, do we know it's a giant waste of money? I don't know the metrics. Don't say that it isn't. Yeah, let's go build it anyway. Let's hope for the best.
Chris Strahl [00:11:29]:
Hei, I really like little island, just to be real with you for a second.
Andii Hei [00:11:33]:
It's fine. It's great. I've been there, too. I love it.
Chris Strahl [00:11:38]:
So when you think about this, like, there's all these different analogs between cities and between design systems, there's all these different ways that design systems both shape and are shaped by the environment that they exist within. And when it all comes back down to it, like, we talk about this a lot on the podcast, the idea of, like, how this mirrors Conway's law, the communication structures and the pathways that you put in place inside of your organization, the design system takes those on, and in doing so, it creates a few new ones. But very often, the structure of these systems mirrors the organizational workflows and communication flows that exist already. Do you think that that is an interesting relationship to the hyper object where if you're, say, Wesco, where you're about to start a new position? I would expect, looking at Wesco, you are going to see a system that very closely mirrors the structure of how that organization communicates and the workflows within it.
Andii Hei [00:12:38]:
One can make the argument like, just because it's a reflection doesn't mean that it has to be that way. And this is where, like, someone who likes to make changes comes in and actually, like, tries to instigate changes. Like, especially when we see a structure that is not as efficient or not as collaborative or whatever. Like maybe they just want to change the culture. To be honest, like, while it is an admirable goal, most of the time, I would see it basically fail because, like, change management is extremely hard. The person who comes in to try to change the thing, more often than not, that person ends up changing rather than the organization changing.
Chris Strahl [00:13:22]:
Well, this is where we get culture and various other things. Right. But like, trying to pull this into the urban planning analogy, we talked about Microsoft a little bit ago, right? Like, let's go back to Microsoft. What is Microsoft's hyper object? Like, what does that relate to?
Andii Hei [00:13:37]:
The way I see it is like Microsoft's fluid design system. That's the hyper object. But also, like, I think that, you know, if you want to see like a real life Microsoft, if you would go, want to visit it, don't go to Seattle, don't go to Redmond, go to New York, have a walk around. You'll see so many different things that should remind you of Microsoft. Okay, I'll just do like a little spiel here. New York starts off like being a colonial settlement, right? To become a trading port, becoming a manufacturing city. And then it evolves to become like a live theater capital and a financial capital of the world. When you look at Microsoft, how does that evolve? Well, it goes from being a software company, like doing Windows, Microsoft office, and all that other stuff.
And then now it has morphed into something much more than that. It morphs into being a leader in cloud computing. AI. Sure. Not all of it is a success. And just like in New York, you can walk around and you go like, yeah, that didn't really turn out the way that we thought.
Chris Strahl [00:14:41]:
Some of this worked and some of it didn't.
Andii Hei [00:14:43]:
Exactly, exactly. There's a lot of historical stuff that you can see there. Probably like, the most fun similarity is that New York has so many skyscrapers that you could argue that it's adorned with windows.
Chris Strahl [00:14:55]:
Oh God. All right, you got me with that one.
Andii Hei [00:15:00]:
All right, first and only pun.
Chris Strahl [00:15:02]:
So, like, what else do you see then? I mean, I think that there's probably too many to go over, but give me like another, you know, one or two that kind of relate these organizations to the way you think about cities.
Andii Hei [00:15:13]:
Okay, so I know that everyone loves Paris. That's another good one. Everyone loves, like, the fact that it looks and feels so charming.
Chris Strahl [00:15:23]:
People think about an espresso and somebody in, like, a cafe, and maybe there's a mime on this.
Andii Hei [00:15:29]:
Yeah, you go there and you go, like, between the first and the fifth arrondissement. And it's so lovely. But I'm willing to bet you 99% of people who are walking around didn't realize that. Oh, it's the city of love. No, it's not just the city of love. It's a city of very restrictive urban planning. Because you see, like, the reason why, like, buildings can only go up to a certain height that is highly regulated. You can't really have an aesthetic unless you actually have those regulations in place.
Now that, to me, kind of reminds me of a way apple likes to do things. You know, like, yeah. With its walled garden approach, with its human design language guidelines. Now, I know, like, for some people, like, they would love to, like, go, oh, no, no, no. Apple is more like maybe Singapore. Ah. But here's where I would basically take the thread. Like, I would just like to point out that what I like about Apple is that, like, they put the human experience at the forefront of their interfaces.
Clean, but also very usable. What Paris also did for city planning is that they also put the pedestrian at the forefront of their experience as well. Like, they didn't just look at, like, a grid of roads and buildings. They thought about, like, how do we make this more livable? How do we stem the flow of people fleeing for the suburbs and actually try to keep the capital? That is something to be proud of, something that people could actually want to live there as well. So you can say about Baron Houseman is basically the Steve Jobs of urban planning.
Chris Strahl [00:17:07]:
I love that. Yeah. I mean, I see where you're going with this. It's interesting, right? I think that when you then think about, okay, the urban planning and the structure of these cities and how they relate to companies, when you think about how the design systems are there. Are the design systems, the planning guidelines, are they the zones and the districts?
Andii Hei [00:17:26]:
Yes, pretty much it. Like, when you think about, like, what a building is, a building is essentially a component, and you can have, like, different purposes of those. You could say, like, well, it's a residential zone, so it'll be used for residential purposes. And so if you look at it from a design or from a company's, point of view. Like, well, what's the analog to that? Well, you could say that, well, that is kind of reflective of like how you market your product. Is this for a consumer? Is this prosumer? Is this for a professional? What market is it actually catering for? What customer segment is it catering for?
Chris Strahl [00:18:01]:
Is that like a neighborhood where you have this idea that like, hey, you know, this is like for example, I live in Portland, right? And so my neighborhood definitely has a vibe. Like northeast Alberta is a vibe and it's very distinct from say like living on the west side of the river. And we have different ideas of the types of environment that we like to have here versus, you know, in the central business district. That's different markets, different groups of people that have different needs.
Andii Hei [00:18:27]:
I'll give you another one that would basically make it like LA being analogous to basically meta. There are so many different districts, different neighborhoods, each with their own vibes. And if you look at Meta's digital landscape, it's also different as well. Instagram does not look like Facebook, Facebook does not look like WhatsApp, whereas you can sort of like see comparatively New York, even though like different borrowers exhibit different looks and feels, there are some certain similarities to it. And that's what basically Microsoft does with its own fluid design. Like it tries to spread that everywhere where it can. There's no distinction between, like it's co pilot, for example, with say, windows, whatever number it is right now.
Chris Strahl [00:19:14]:
Yeah, I mean, usually the copilot button is like just a part of windows. And I actually think that's kind of cool when we think about this. Like, what we're talking about when we're talking about the creation of cities and the creation of design systems is how do a bunch of people get together and decide on the constraints? And those constraints then represent how a city gets constructed. And those rules are different for every different city. They're even as specific as like, what neighborhoods actually want and desire. And so between that idea of like, here's a city government, here's a regional or neighborhood association, here's my individual building or house, that's lots of different sets of constraints that get enforced that I think have a good parallel in a design system. When you think about that, how does that get back to this idea of creativity and like, why is that the world we want to live in versus urban anarchy?
Andii Hei [00:20:11]:
Yeah, okay, so this might not be a very popular take with design systems, or should I say with digital landscapes and cities. Both of them spring up organically. They exist at a time before design systems ever became a thing, some of them would have, like, really esoteric laws that don't really make any sense after about, like, six decades or stuff like that. Now, if you want to take a city that really doesn't really have any infrastructure, or, like, it evolves purely organically, like, pure chaos, you can either look at, like, the old walled city in Kowloon.
Chris Strahl [00:20:51]:
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking about.
Andii Hei [00:20:54]:
Yep. One that's still standing would be maybe favelas in Rio. So you've got those two extremes. Then you can go for something much more on the other extreme, which is more, like, very planned, not as organic, maybe closer to Singapore, interestingly enough. And this is a funny thing, like, I'm not a huge fan of saying, like, let's plan things to the nth degree at the very beginning, because it's like, I'm going to put down the parallel between, like, I think it's the Dubai one or something like that.
Chris Strahl [00:21:26]:
Yep. I literally just typed pictures of Dubai into Google.
Andii Hei [00:21:32]:
Right? That line, it's been created with, like, a theoretical, like, assumptions of, like, how people are gonna work and live and stuff like that. But that's not how cities work. And you can't create a design system by just coming up with, like, well, I'm just gonna create, like, a whole bunch of colors here. Like, I'm gonna create a color primitives here. I'm gonna create, like, all these typography styles, all these spacing here. Like, yep, I'm going to create a system, have a code equivalent, you know, code snippets to go with it and done. That's not how it works. That is a system that is going to fail.
Andii Hei [00:22:09]:
I'm sorry to buy, but that city is going to fail. But anyway.
Chris Strahl [00:22:15]:
I mean, time will tell.
Andii Hei [00:22:17]:
Yes, time will tell. But a good one to look at of how a planned city does evolve over time, right? Like, how it breaks free from its initial vision, is Brasilia. You look at the way that Brasilia was built and, like, the fort that has gone into it, and you'll see that, like, over time, it does not evolve the way that the architect or the urban planner initially thought it was going to evolve. You know, like, just because, like, you put so much thought and process and consideration, and you asked everyone, and you had, like, all of these nice theories in place, you put parks there, you make sure that the amenities people want to travel between neighborhoods, not just because, like, oh, I have everything I need in my neighborhood. It's just more like, because, like, I might want to experience something new now in design systems world. How that relates, is that like, yeah, sure, this component does do what I think it would do, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I might want to use it. Now, I know that sounds controversial for a lot of design system practitioners, but it also speaks to, like, what the designer is thinking. The designer as an artist, as a craftsman, but also, like, there's an innate desire for us to create something new or at least experience something new.
Chris Strahl [00:23:33]:
Yeah. So I think that that's an evolution. Right. And I think actually, like, one of the things that I often talk about with customers, with folks in the design systems community is like, really mature design systems. Don't fear removing things, culling things. And in large part, when you think about that evolution you have, just like any city, it goes through ages and time and trends, and there's these things that represent timeless change that stick. Portland. It's our bridges, right? We're the city of Bridges.
Chris Strahl [00:24:04]:
And so Bridgetown is a big part of our identity as a place, but at the same time, the landscape of those bridges has evolved over the past hundred years really dramatically. And so when you think about those things that anchor you to a place, you want those to be present, but you also don't want to be afraid to let go of things that are no longer relevant or interesting. And I think this gets back to this idea of constraints, right? So when you think about these structures and constraints that exist within our cities, within our design systems, what we're really doing is testing our decision making. We're saying, like, hey, here's a bunch of different decisions we've codified. Are these working for us? And we need to constantly be reevaluating if they are. I think a great example that you brought up before the show is this idea about, like, accessibility, right? When you have all these different buildings in a place like, where you live, like New York, that never were built with people with, like, wheelchairs or limited mobility in mind, that was a major change for that city.
Andii Hei [00:25:06]:
The great thing about design systems is that, like, a lot of the considerations has been taken into account at a fundamental level. Like, for example, the accessibility wheelchair ramp is a great example, I think, in that, like, imagine that every single architect who's designing a new building had to figure out, like, what the ideal gradient was. It would be like a silly and massive waste of time. In the same sense about, like, imagine we didn't have the accessibility guidelines, or I should say, like, imagine we didn't test out the contrast ratio inside a button, or at least, like, between these different text colors. Like, how much of a waste of time would it be for the designer to keep constantly having to test this out? The idea is that, like, we gave you the gradient. You can design it in any way, shape or form. That basically makes that gradient consistent. Like, hey, you want to make 90 degree angles on that wheelchair ramp, that's great to make a turn, but it still needs to be along that angle.
That's the same with, say, for example, text colors or background colors and all that sort of stuff. You can actually create, like a focus state or whatever it is, so long as it is clearly a focused state. I know that at the beginning of design systems, when it was nascent, right, like, at the beginning, there were a lot of designers who feared, and probably some of them still do fear, that design systems would take away their creativity. And I get frustrated and I push back on that because how I think about it is that, like, you kind of are lacking an imagination here. The reason why I say that is that if you look at all the great stuff that we've built, it is built out of, like, trying to circumvent those restrictions. So what do I mean by that? If you look at, say, for example, the World Trade center and you look at the Whitney Museum, did you know that those two buildings are built around the same time with slightly different purposes, but they are subject to basically the same regulations? And look how different they are.
Chris Strahl [00:27:08]:
Yeah, I mean, they couldn't be more different. Like, literally, like, one of them is a giant tower, the other is this, like, beautiful, artistic sculpture.
Andii Hei [00:27:15]:
Yeah. Right now, same regulations, same zoning, built with different requirements. If you're basically saying that regulations like design systems is restricting creativity, like, you have no idea how many regulations they are that an architect, a developer has to meet. And they can come up with that. What you're saying is that, oh, you're incapable of that. No, no, no. We just need to think harder. Just because, like, these rules are in place means that you can actually figure out a way on how to meet those requirements.
That's where you come in. That's where the creativity comes in. That's where your imagination comes in. The fact that you say that, oh, it's just going to limit my imagination or limit my creativity. No, no, no. That means you haven't thought about it long enough. You haven't looked at the problem long enough. Take a sport like f one year on year, it basically puts in more regulations to basically restrict engineers and designers from doing the thing that engineers and designers do best, which is basically go, oh, that front wing flexes when it's under load.
Yes, that's right. It does that at a certain speed because, like, you didn't put a rule in there to basically do that. So we now have this competitive advantage for about six races. Are we really cheating, or did you not look at the rules properly?
Chris Strahl [00:28:39]:
All this has been really fascinating. I love the way that your mind works, finding all these different parallels between something you're obviously passionate about, travel and urban planning and structures and design systems. I want to throw a curveball into the equation. What about new technologies that are going to change the way that we think about our city as a whole? Something like AI and, I don't know, like, maybe we revolutionize transportation and every city all of a sudden gets hoverboards or teleporters or something like that, right? So it changes some fundamental calculus or some fundamental math about how a city gets constructed and how people navigate it. I look at AI as something that is changing that fundamental calculus. And so when you think about that, like, kind of take me through how you associate that with your metaphor.
Andii Hei [00:29:31]:
With AI, it is representing a very much like a new way for us to do things. Like, before, to create a building like the Burj Khalifa, you would have had to go through so many iterations of model testing, putting it through a wind tunnel to make sure that it actually works properly and stuff like that. In our design discipline, it has the potential for us to move in a direction where we're nothing used to like, whereas before we were craftsmen, we went to becoming a factory worker. Right? Like in design systems world. And then now with AI, we are now going to become a bunch of Damien Hirst, basically conceptual artists. So now it's all about probably, like, being able to prompt correctly and probably also being able to have enough knowledge to look at the output and go like, I need to refine this, this, this and this here. I would argue that AI can be very useful, but it also could be very dangerous depending on how you use the technology. Like, my primary concern is that because of how quickly and how well it does it, at first glance, there's a possibility that an organization who's looking to cut costs would just say, well, that output looks good enough.
Why can't we just take that output and be done with it? And I would say that that's a disservice for our craft, for what we and how we actually do things to solve things, because I tend to humanize it, but I know it's not thinking. Like, I sit back, I think for two minutes, like half a minute, and I'm like, it's not a thinking machine. Like, it does not know how to think. It's basically generating all of these things based on its training data.
Chris Strahl [00:31:18]:
So, Andii, this has been so interesting to just understand the metaphors in your mind and the way you think about how these structures and the things that we build relate to building cities. And I just want to say thank you so much for being on the show. This has been a really fun conversation.
Andii Hei [00:31:35]:
Thank you very much. It was lovely chatting with you.
Chris Strahl [00:31:38]:
This has been the Design System Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. Have a great day, everybody. That's all for today.
This has been another episode of the Design Systems Podcast. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions or a topic you'd like to know more about, find us on Twitter at thedspod. We'd love to hear from you with show ideas, recommendations, questions, or comments. As always, this pod is brought to you by knapsack. You can check us out at knapsack.cloud. Have a great day.