Into Design Systems Meetup at SURF Incubator

Name: Into Design Systems Meetup at SURF Incubator
Start: 2025-09-19T12:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-09-19T16:00:00-07:00
Location: Surf Incubator

Hosted By

Feng and 2 others

Into Design Systems Meetup at SURF Incubator

Details

🚨 Required: Please register on Luma to attend

Even if you've signed up here on Meetup, you must also register through our Luma link. This makes it easier for us organizers to accurately track attendance and helps transition our community to Luma.

Additionally, Luma registration is required to participate in the hands-on interactive workshop portion with TJ Pitre. You can still attend to observe the presentations, but workshop participation requires Luma registration.

Luma Event Sign Up
We're transitioning our event management to Luma for better coordination - thanks for your understanding!

Into Design Systems Meetup in Seattle, WA! 🇺🇸 🥳 Join our casual, friendly in-person DS event at SURF Incubator in Seattle, generously sponsored by our friends at Knapsack!

👩🏻‍💻👨🏾‍💻🧑🏼‍💻 Who is this for?
EVERYONE is welcome: designers, developers, POs, PMs, managers, researchers, accessibility specialists, freelancers, founders, professionals, students - anybody! 🤗

✨ For this event, our topic is AI!✨ We are featuring a talk by one of our very own local DS voices Pegah Ahmadi, and also an interactive workshop & presentation by the amazing TJ Pitre!

Agenda:

12:00 PM - Doors & check-in

12:30 PM - Welcome & Introduction

12:40 PM - 1:00 PM - "System Gaze: Seeing Bias, Shaping Trust" - talk & presentation by featured speaker Pegah Ahmadi - past Design Systems at Nike, Grubhub & Morningstar

When we design systems, whether AI systems powered by algorithms and data or design systems powered by tokens and components, we are also designing perception. These systems quietly decide what’s visible, what’s hidden, and what feels trustworthy. I call this the System Gaze: the lens through which systems shape what we see and believe. In this talk, we’ll explore how bias enters invisibly, why trust is so fragile, and how stories can guide our ethical choices. Walk away with language and frameworks to help their teams see bias more clearly and design for trust in an age of intelligent tools.

1:00 PM - 3:00 PM - "Context-Based Design Systems in the Age of AI" - Interactive AI Workshop by featured speaker & instructor TJ Pitre - Founder & CEO at Southleft
⚠️ Note: Luma registration required for hands-on participation

Design systems are shifting from static component libraries to intelligent, context-aware ecosystems. In this workshop with TJ, you’ll start with a presentation on the concept of Context-Based Design Systems and why context matters more than components alone.

From there, TJ will demonstrate the full lifecycle - from enhancing your existing Figma project, to analyzing and adjusting component metadata and properties, to generating production-ready components with the Figma MCP. You’ll also see how Knapsack’s MCP fits into the picture, alongside Story UI and other AI-powered tools.

After the demo, participants will have the opportunity to jump in hands-on with a shared boilerplate repo and Figma file. We’ll build components together, experiment with MCP workflows, and even handle the inevitable “things breaking” moments, because improving design systems is about responding to real-world friction, not chasing perfection.

We’ll wrap with a discussion and Q&A to ground these ideas in practical implementation.