Collaboration
Designsystemet is more than a set of components and guidelines. It's a collaborative arena where we agree on what the user experience across the public sector should be—and how we can continuously improve it together. Most importantly, it gives us an open space to discuss accessibility, rather than handling such discussions in isolation within each organization.
Through an open-source community, Designsystemet has a wide range of users who influence the solution through feedback, contributions, and code. We also saw a need for closer involvement from more organizations to ensure that Designsystemet addresses shared needs. That's why we now have a cross-agency core team working on daily development. We plan together, have daily standups and retrospectives, and hold working meetings around various challenges. Designers and developers work closely together. We maintain an open GitHub repo, backlog, and discussion threads, and aim to be as transparent as possible.
The development team includes designers and developers from The Norwegian Digitalisation Agency, the Brønnøysund Register Centre, the Norwegian Food Safety Authority, the Directorate for Education and Training, and KS Digital—alongside a broad network of contributors from other organizations helping shape Designsystemet.
We want to strengthen this collaboration even further. Could it be an opportunity for your organisation to take part in this development team? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch via email.
Open demos
Each month we host open demos for anyone interested in Designsystemet. Here we showcase what the team has been working on and share what's coming up. These demos are a valuable opportunity to gather feedback and shape the path forward together.
Contact us for an invite to the demo
Communication in Slack
To succeed with a shared design system, we need a shared space to communicate and collaborate across organizations. That’s why we’ve created an open Slack workspace for anyone interested in Designsystemet—whether you're actively using it, considering it, or just curious.
When we plan major changes or encounter challenges, we post in Slack to get input and feedback. The channel is also a space to ask questions, share experiences, and discuss anything from practical issues to overarching principles. Designers, developers, product owners, and other stakeholders can exchange ideas, provide input, and learn from each other.
We support design systems in general and hope Slack will contribute to knowledge sharing and a strong professional community across organizations. Together, we evolve both Designsystemet and the expertise around it.
Join us on Slack and contribute—big or small. All questions and feedback are welcome!
Pattern collaboration
In addition to the development team, we also have a cross-agency effort to establish shared patterns across public services. This collaboration is important for creating a more holistic and consistent user experience. It's also part of Action 26 in the government's digital inclusion plan, which aims to promote more unified interaction patterns.
Designsystem teams from Digdir, NAV, the Norwegian Tax Administration, the Brønnøysund Register Centre, Oslo Municipality, the Police, and Entur are among those participating. We gather insights from our own organizations, review them, identify differences, and align on a common approach through regular working meetings. The outcome is articles and recommendations published on the Patterns page.
Openness and transparency
We share everything openly:
How can you contribute?
There’s no fixed way to contribute—just reach out on Slack when you have a need, and we’ll explore it together.
We appreciate any help in improving and shaping Designsystemet. The best solutions come through collaboration. For developers, we have a contributing guide on GitHub that explains how to contribute with code.
New component
If you want to suggest a new component, we’d appreciate it if you register it in GitHub.
When a new component is proposed, we assess whether it brings enough value to be part of Designsystemet. We want to avoid hundreds of components with small differences, as that can lead to unnecessary complexity, maintenance burdens, and design/technical debt.
For new components, we assess:
- Whether similar needs exist across other product teams or agencies. How many products or agencies would benefit?
- The problem the component solves and the value it brings.
- Whether it can be made flexible and reusable enough.
- Whether it aligns with our design principles and fits into the overall system.
Report a bug or issue in Figma
If you've found an issue with an existing component in Figma, we appreciate either a comment directly in Figma or a bug report in GitHub, or alternatively, a feature request describing the functionality you’re looking for.
Write an article
Do you have experiences you’d like to share? This could be anything from how you've adopted Designsystemet, solved a component challenge, worked with accessibility, or gathered user insights. You can write a blog post or an article for our "Best practices" section.
Do you have feedback or thoughts to share? Want to get more involved in the collaboration? Send us an email at designsystem@digdir.no. All feedback is welcome.
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