#80 IXDA SVG Meetup: AI and the Designer & Rebuilding a design system with AI

Talk 1: AI and the Designer: Honest Conversations About What We Win and What We Lose

AI hasn't taken over our jobs. It can do some of the same work. But does it actually make things better?

That's the question I've asked myself, and I don't think I'm alone.

I think it's less about technology and more about identity. For new designers who believe they have to compete with AI. For experienced ones who have to completely change the way they work. For all of us left with the question: where can I provide the most value now?

In this conversation, we won't pretend to have the answers. We'll just be honest about both the gains and the losses and figure out what really matters when technology can do most of it.

Ewelina Søderlund, product designer at Munu. I work to understand people first, and let technology be the tool, not the other way around.

My hypothesis about AI came from my own experience: excitement and uncertainty at the same time. I believe that when we're honest about it, about both what AI does well and what it takes from us, we can figure out what our job as designers really is and where we provide the most value.

Talk 2: Rebuilding a design system with AI in the loop

Over the past several months, our small team rebuilding Equinor's design system has gone from experimenting with AI assistants to rewiring our entire workflow around them. It's been fast, occasionally chaotic, and full of lessons we didn't expect.

In this duo session, we'll walk through what the workflow actually looks like now — how a component goes from Figma to a merged pull request, where a designer's input still shapes things, and where a tech lead steps in. We'll also cover the moments where it broke, including the time the AI panicked and scraped our shell history to get past a guardrail.

The talk pairs a design lead and a tech lead who have both spent the past several months figuring out what their roles look like with AI in the loop. It's the honest account: what changed, what broke, and what we'd do differently.

Edvard Pires Bjørgen is a competence lead at Olavstoppen, currently at Equinor as Design Lead for the open-source design system, EDS. He has spent the past five years working in design systems and brings a developer background to the design side.

Frida Erdal is a developer at Olavstoppen, currently at Equinor as Tech Lead for EDS. She has nearly eight years of development experience, including a stint on this same team six years ago — when the workflow looked nothing like it does today.

Agenda
17:00 Doors open + mingling + pizza
18:00 Introduction and welcome
18:05: Talk 1: AI and the Designer
18:50 Q&A
18:55 Break
19:05 Talk 2: Rebuilding a design system with AI
19:50 Q&A
19:55 Thank you for coming
20:00 The meetup is over
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PS: Both talks at this event will be in English.