Empowering designers: AI, design systems, and quality | Schema by Figma 2025

Quick Overview

The presentation concludes that empowering designers through AI integration with design systems requires setting and maintaining quality across multiple tools, enabling system exploration and iteration by preventing off-system distractions, and designing to be technology agnostic to ensure system data is queryable regardless of the tool used, which ultimately leads to better collaboration and faster iteration cycles.

Key Points: The core challenge is setting and maintaining quality across multiple tools (design and engineering) due to the proliferation of LLM tools that developers are familiar with. LinkedIn's design system team shifted scope from merely managing libraries to offering a 'Design System as a Service' model, enabling proactive governance across design and code. A key learning is the critical need to enable on-system exploration and iteration by preventing off-system distractions, ensuring stakeholders remain focused on system assets. The system must be technology agnostic, meaning its data must be queryable regardless of the tool (Figma, Make, etc.) being used, which helps align contributors across disciplines. By applying the system assets (like tokens and specs) directly into tools like Figma's 'Make' feature, designers can prototype and iterate faster without copying/pasting external content. The team learned that expecting AI/LLM tools to change is necessary; they are now focused on enabling collaboration across multiple disciplines company-wide.

Context: Grant Blakeman, Staff Design Engineer at LinkedIn, presented at Schema by Figma about how the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) is transforming the role of design systems. The talk focuses on the challenges and lessons learned from scaling design quality and consistency while integrating these new AI-powered workflows both inside and outside the company ecosystem.

Detailed Analysis

Blakeman argues that the rise of LLMs is blurring traditional role boundaries (designer vs. engineer) and creating challenges in maintaining design system quality and consistency across various tools used by different teams. To address this, LinkedIn's Design System team evolved their role to become a 'Design System as a Service,' focusing on proactive governance rather than just library management. A major lesson learned is the necessity of enabling on-system exploration and iteration by strictly preventing off-system distractions, which is critical for maintaining quality when designers are experimenting with AI tools. Furthermore, the system must remain technology agnostic—the system data must be queryable regardless of the tool (like Make or Figma) being used—to ensure consistency across the company. This approach allows designers to easily apply system content (like tokens or specs) to prototypes, leading to faster iteration and better communication between design and engineering partners. The presentation concludes by emphasizing that embracing change and expecting tools to evolve is vital for success in this new environment.