About

Have you met Lydia?

Lydia, chin resting on her hand, smiling beneath café string lights.

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.

Mission

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