Schedule
Conference Day - Thursday 30th October, 2025
About the session
Arrive, pick up your badge and goodies, have a chat to the zeroheight folks, and have a coffee and pastry
About the session
Luke Murphy, our MC for Converge, will take welcome you to the conference, take you through the day and cover off the important info.
About the speaker
Luke (they/them) is Head of Advocacy at zeroheight. They have been a product designer, developer, and design systems advocate for over 10 years. They are the co-host of DesignOps Island Discs, Design Systems WTF, and author the Design Systems Report for zeroheight. Outside of work, Luke co-runs the WDC conference in Bristol, hosts Side Quest in London, co-founded the Nothing Sounds Good vinyl susbcription service, and spends the rest of their time shouting in a queer punk band.
About the session
TBA.
About the speaker
Madelin (she/her) is Head of Product at zeroheight. She stumbled into tech 10 years ago, reveled in the whirlwind of early-stage companies, and has spent the past four years figuring out what design systems are all about. She’s happiest with a spicy bourbon in hand, asking too many questions, and exploring the systems that shape how we work.
About the session
The design system of the future isn’t just a collection of components—it’s foundational infrastructure for how teams build, collaborate, and ship.
The playbook we followed in the 2010s is showing its age. It’s time to stop treating design systems as static artifacts and start thinking of them as interfaces for collaboration—between designers, engineers, PMs, and yes, even machines.
In this talk, we’ll expand our ideas of what a design system is and what it can do: define shared language, encode intent, and unlock new capabilities across roles.
We’ll see tools like Figma MCP, Replit, and Dessn in action, brainstorm new abstractions and ways to encode design intent, and explore how a design system can unlock new capabilities across roles. Along the way, we’ll look at how systems can continue bridging the gap between ideas and implementation—connecting the language of design with the logic of code in ways that support more seamless collaboration.
Come for the spicy ideas, leave with a broader idea of what a design system can be and how it can give you and your team superpowers.
About the speaker
Elyse Holladay (she/her) is a long-time Design Systems practitioner and speaker, currently the Staff Design Engineer for Color Health's Continuum Design System. She was tapped to start the first Design System team for Indeed, has taught hundreds of hours of technical training content, and has been invited to speak at well-known industry events such as Clarity Conference, CSSConf Berlin, and Frontend Design Conference. She is also the host of On Theme: Design Systems in Depth. She's a technical generalist, off-the-charts extrovert, avid reader, and expat Texan with an armadillo tattoo.
About the session
Presented with a nearly impossible task, Guy's team had to build a design system to support dozens of enterprise products within a fragmented organization. Learning from past mistakes, they approached it the only way they could; by focusing on the humans building it, and those who will be using it on a daily basis.
About the speaker
Guy is a design leader with over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, specializing in UX, product design, and DesignOps. His expertise in design leadership and people management has allowed him to foster innovation and collaboration within design teams, establishing robust design practices and leading them to success. In recent years, Guy has focused on design systems, building and growing teams around the practice, and launching systems that optimize efficiency and enhance user experiences.
About the session
Get yourself a coffee and a snack, and come back for the second round of sessions.
About the session
More often than not, front-end developers focus purely on improving their technical skills.
This session will demonstrate a better approach, showing how developers can produce simpler, more resilient codebases by enhancing their planning and core skills—particularly by improving how they provide and receive feedback from their designer colleagues.
About the speaker
Andy Bell (he/him) is a designer, front-end developer, and the founder of Set Studio and Piccalilli, with over 15 years of experience building websites for clients ranging from early-stage startups to some of the world’s best-known multinational brands. He specializes in creating stunning, accessible websites that work for everyone—no matter their device or connection speed—while bridging the gap between design and development.
Through his educational projects, Andy has established himself as a trusted voice in the front-end community. He is the creator of the Complete CSS Course (complete-css.com), co-author of Every Layout (every-layout.dev), and publisher of The Index newsletter (piccalil.li/the-index/), where he shares insights on building simpler, more resilient codebases.
When he’s not designing or coding, Andy curates music and writes about web development, fostering a community of developers who value thoughtful, inclusive, and performant web experiences.
About the session
Question: What happens when a design system team and a service design team work together to introduce the first service pattern at a huge, commercially oriented company?
Answer: It's bloody hard work, you'll want to give up and quit about a hundred times, but you'll find a way. And then you'll do it all over again (but better).
In this talk, we’ll share the real story of what happened when design system and service design teams came together to create EE's first service pattern. We'll be honest about the bumps we hit along the way, what we learned, and how we’re changing our approach as we work on more service patterns together. For those in design systems, service design, or somewhere in between, this session will offer insights on how we can amplify each other’s impact.
About the speaker
Frances (she/her) leads EE’s Consumer Design System, Loop. She enjoys being part of a talented, passionate team, prioritising the user while navigating a complex and rapidly changing organisation. Frances loves puzzles, whether it’s working out how to produce documentation that gets read, creating Lego models or guessing the culprit in a classic crime novel.
About the session
If a design system requires mandates, adoption is already challenged. Too many design systems roll out with fanfare... and land with a thud. Endless documentation, repeated training, and communication channels flooded with the same five questions can become unsustainable. The result is a system people know about, but don’t truly know how to use.
This talk explores how education, when treated as a product in its own right, can drive trust, build confidence, and create lasting fluency. We’ll talk about designing training for that magic “click” moment, when people finally understand how the system works, why it matters, and when using a design system becomes instinctive. From meeting teams where they are, to weaving learning into daily workflows, to creating the muscle memory that turns first-time users into confident advocates, we’ll look at how to make both learning and training feel natural. When education clicks, the system becomes second nature: and that’s when adoption truly lifts off.
About the speaker
Ashley Zhu (she/her) is a Senior Product Designer and Education Lead for Capital One’s enterprise design system. She delights in making complex systems intuitive and creating welcoming learning experiences that turn first-time users into confident advocates. Outside of work, she finds joy in dreaming up new recipes in the kitchen, nature poetry, and dancing anywhere there’s music.
Erin Potter (she/her) is a Senior Manager and Experience Lead for Capital One’s enterprise design system. She leads a team designing and documenting componentry, educating users, and driving adoption of the system. She has spent time managing coalitions for design systems, establishing platform processes, and running a local system. When not daydreaming of component lifecycles, she fills her time with 2 teenagers, 2 meowzers, 1 patient husband and often going to see bands, binging the latest series, or weightlifting.
About the session
We'll provide some tasty lunch for folks. The Redwoods community will be hosting lunchtime discussion sessions around all your favourite design system topics.
About the session
In the design community, constraints are often seen as creativity’s enemy. A cage that stifles imagination and expression. But what if this common belief is exactly backward? This talk challenges the myth that “unbounded creativity” leads to better user experiences.
Drawing on Karl Duncker’s famous Candle Problem and the global sensation of MacGyver, we’ll explore the cognitive bias known as functional fixedness. How our minds get stuck seeing things only one way, limiting innovation. By embracing constraints, from user needs and product requirements to brand guidelines and technical boundaries, we unlock a richer, more focused kind of creativity.
This talk argues for mastering the resources and rules you are given to solve problems effectively within the box. Design systems aren’t meant to fight creativity; they are the scaffolding that helps teams support consistent, user-centered solutions while delivering a package of thoughtful design expressions.
About the speaker
Donnie D'Amato (he/him) is a Design Systems Architect based in New York, recognized for his expertise in building and leading design systems that bridge the gap between design and engineering. He is the Founder and Chief Architect of Design Systems House, a consultancy focused on advancing the future of design systems for organizations of all sizes. He is an active member in design systems communities, facilitating knowledge sharing and professional growth among designers and engineers. He is well-known for his hot takes such as 'Colors Don't Solve Problems' and 'Ondark Virus' from his blog and a podcast turned live show called Wireframe. He has a book coming soon called 'Mise en Mode', meant to support creative expression through the lens of a design system.
About the session
This session explores the challenges and innovations of building a design system from the ground up, where engineering and design teams worked hand-in-hand to push beyond the limits of traditional design tools. Instead of letting tool constraints dictate the output, we expanded on established practices like design tokens to develop a system of dynamic compound tokens—allowing behaviours and appearances to be expressed far more efficiently.
The result is a translation layer that bridges design and development seamlessly. Components that once required tens of thousands of state definitions can now be described on just a handful of axes—dramatically improving consistency, reducing implementation overhead, and accelerating iteration.
About the speaker
Bill (he/him) is a common or garden developer, currently leading the web development efforts at HP's design system, Veneer. He drifted his way to design systems via synthetic biology, curriculum management, and automotive infotainment system SDKs. Clearly he lacks any vision for what he wants to do with his professional life. He enjoys complaining about how little sleep his six-year-old affords him and overengineering his model railway, but dislikes writing about himself in the third person.
About the session
Design system teams, so beautifully at the intersection of design and engineering, are perfectly positioned to lead in times of rapid change. This is because creativity and technology have been deeply intertwined for most of human history, and creative makers have always played the key role of being the ones to embrace new technology and shape the way it is integrated into daily life.
It's not a question of if AI integrating itself into our lives, but how. How amazing that according to historical precedent, it's actually up to us, the designers and engineers and all creators in-between, to shape how new technologies will impact us and our work! We're the ones who get to shape how new tools will affect our skills, how we collaborate, what skills we value, how we hire, how we run teams, and imagine a future we never even dreamed of when we pushed our first pixel or wrote our first hello world.
As creatives in tech, we are equally well positioned to shape the future as we are vulnerable to it. Fortunately, your creativity and humanity are the superpowers. Part group therapy and part practical tips and takeaways, this talk threads together history, psychology, and hard earned lessons about leading teams of incredibly talented people through major changes.
I’m not here to squeeze productivity out of you, introduce any clever AI hacks, or promise that I have all of the answers. But, if you've ever felt the high stakes pressure of people counting on you to lead the way through the ambiguity of incredible change, this talk is for you. Design systems were never about buttons anyway.
About the speaker
Natalya (she/her) is a designer, developer, artist, author, educator, and doer of good deeds. She recently joined Datadog to lead the designers working on the DRUIDS design system. Previously, she worked at GitHub leading the Primer design system team. Before that, it was the New York Times, as well as teaching at Harvard Extension. She loves to write, publishing the Design Engineering Handbook and articles for various online publications. Natalya holds bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Psychology, and a master's in Creativity and Talent Development. Crossing disciplines and building bridges between design and engineering is at the foundation of much of her work, and building teams, growing community, and investing in human creativity at scale is the next big adventure.
About the session
Get yourself a coffee and a snack, and come back for the final round of sessions.
About the session
What if your design system wasn’t hidden, but integrated right where creativity happens? Discover how leveraging Zeroheight’s APIs can transform Figma into a unified powerhouse—making your design system accessible instantly, exactly when and where designers need it most.
Explore how seamless integration unlocks speed, drives consistency, and boost adoption across teams.
Join this session and experience the future where powerful design systems are built directly into the tools designers love.
About the speaker
Julien (he/him) is a passionate UX/UI leader with 15+ years of experience working on various projects, business segments, and a multilingual environment.
Exchanging, evolving, testing and starting over. UX design's DNA mimics my career with only one goal: Get the best out of it and meet the users/customers needs with fair, sustainable and adapted proposals.
About the session
Luddites, Futurists, and the Systems of Tomorrow
The framing of conversations about the future shapes its direction. By recognizing that, we can take a leadership role in those conversations, directing our industry toward a future we want to see. John Voss will take a historical view—from the Industrial Revolution to the Italian Futurists—to demonstrate how the conversations we’re having today are centuries in the making.
About the speaker
John Voss (he/him) is a product designer on the framework team at Descript. He’s been the lead designer on design systems at Stitch Fix and Squarespace and is an alum of Mule Design.
He also co-founded Queer Design Club, a group that promotes and celebrates the amazing work that happens at the intersection of queer identity and design. He cares deeply about design, designers, and our impact on the larger world.
About the session
Luke will wrap up the day with some closing remarks.
About the speaker
Luke (they/them) is Head of Advocacy at zeroheight. They have been a product designer, developer, and design systems advocate for over 10 years. They are the co-host of DesignOps Island Discs, Design Systems WTF, and author the Design Systems Report for zeroheight. Outside of work, Luke co-runs the WDC conference in Bristol, hosts Side Quest in London, co-founded the Nothing Sounds Good vinyl susbcription service, and spends the rest of their time shouting in a queer punk band.
About the session
We'll wind down with some drinks courtesy of zeroheight at The Cocktail Club, 37-39 Corn St, Bristol BS1 1HT.