Design debt accumulates when decisions get made under pressure without enough thought. It shows up as inconsistencies, workarounds, and interfaces that require explanation rather than affording their own use. At a certain level it slows the team down: every new feature has to navigate the existing mess. Tracking it as a metric makes the invisible visible rather than leaving it as a vague sense that things are getting harder. [[Design is scaling]] is the frame: debt is evidence that the design infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with growth.
[[Scorecards to pilot design system migration]] makes debt concrete before a migration starts, and tracking it through [[Implementing a design system]] shows whether the migration is working. The debt accumulates not because people are careless but because [[Software design should be opinionated]] is hard to sustain when the pace of shipping exceeds the capacity for considered decisions.