Caterpillar Behavior Chart

A design system in the digital world is like a set of Lego bricks—a collection of predefined buttons, forms, typography styles, and grid layouts that can be combined to build any number of new pages or features quickly and consistently. The first of these is "external storage," where the printable chart itself becomes a tangible, physical reminder of our intentions. Go for a run, take a shower, cook a meal, do something completely unrelated to the project. The perfect, all-knowing cost catalog is a utopian ideal, a thought experiment. To think of a "cost catalog" was redundant; the catalog already was a catalog of costs, wasn't it? The journey from that simple certainty to a profound and troubling uncertainty has been a process of peeling back the layers of that single, innocent number, only to find that it is not a solid foundation at all, but the very tip of a vast and submerged continent of unaccounted-for consequences. It was, in essence, an attempt to replicate the familiar metaphor of the page in a medium that had no pages.