Converge 2025: From Promises to Practice: The Future of Design Systems - Elyse Holladay

About the talk

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.