Why are design systems by many companies publicly available?

Question

Why do many companies like IBM, GE, VMWare, etc make their design systems publicly available? Designers find it useful, but how is is helpful to those companies and why do they do it?

Answer 1

There are many reasons why a company might do this, but I think the main reasons seem to be:

• It is a great way to promote the brand of the company (in terms of their design philosophy and user experience focus)
• It is a good way to get feedback from the wider design community to improve on the design system
• It is a good way to test the robustness of the design system if it is adopted or used by other designers (e.g. Material Design)
• For some companies it is a product/service that they want to make it easily accessible to their potential customers

Answer 2

The basic reason is they easily get customer perspective which reduces A/B testing efforts.

There are many companies uses the feedback form or big data analysis to know about the customer and there need. Surveys are conducted for the same. If I gave access to customers to design by their own I can understand customer behavior, I have saved time in designing, brainstorming which leads to cost-saving. And the output is as per customer requirement which leads to retaining the client (also new clients) which helps out to grow the business.