About

Have you met Lydia?

I'm a design system architect at Microsoft, working on Fluent — the design system that ships across Microsoft's product surface. My work focuses on making design systems usable by both humans and machines.

My career has a through-line: I've always been interested in how meaning gets made and transmitted. I started in linguistics and language teaching, moved through localization and content design, and arrived at design systems — which are, at their core, a language problem. A shared vocabulary for building products together.

When AI arrived in product development, I became interested in the same question one level up: how do you make a design system legible to a model? What does it mean for an AI agent to "know" a design system? What breaks when it doesn't?

That's where I work now. I apply method to the mess and scaffold it into intuitive systems that are easy to use and reliably deliver coherence across teams and products.

The arc

  1. 1

    Language and meaning systems

    Linguistics, creative writing, teaching English — grounding in how language carries meaning across contexts.

  2. 2

    Content design and localization

    Making products legible to real people, across languages and cultures. Learning that content is a design material.

  3. 3

    Design systems

    Building the shared vocabularies that let teams make consistent decisions at scale.

  4. 4

    AI-enabled systems

    Designing the architecture that lets AI participate in design system work — reliably, and without hallucinating.

What I care about

  • — Finding the connection points between things that seem separate — and making sure they work together
  • — Giving teams the tools they need within the systems they already have
  • — Inclusion as architecture, not afterthought — products that serve everyone by design
  • — Making expertise legible: turning specialized knowledge into structures other people can actually use