Governance

Emerging design practice: formal 'behavioral contracts' define how AI agents decide, handle failures, and communicate. These policy documents live alongside wireframes and specs — a new design artifact for the agentic era. Marks the beginning of a discipline where designers define agent constraints, not just visual flows.

Practical playbook for running a design-system contribution workflow. Covers RFCs, communication rituals, reusable templates, phased adoption, and the maintenance work that keeps the system healthy.

Autonomous agents now span Figma → Jira → GitHub — detecting design drift, enforcing brand principles, and flagging accessibility failures in code. This is the governance-beyond-humans model: agents become the system's immune system. Unified collaboration hubs replace handoff lag with real-time spec access in editors and tickets.

Operating-model guide for enterprise design systems covering ownership, federated governance, adoption, legacy migration, vendor controls, and metrics. Useful for teams planning the work that follows launch.