Components as Data for Humans and Machines

AI has pushed design systems to improve the structure, precision, and durability of their core asset: the UI components catalog. System users expect components to be produced fast, evolve predictably, and work consistently across platforms. In this talk, Nathan will reflect on his past year architecting component specifications as a platform-agnostic source-of-truth separate from any single implementation (including Figma). Components aren’t defined in any one tool, implementation, or visual; instead, they are an intent recorded as data and managed through a lifecycle.

In this talk, Nathan will cover how he translates design intent out of Figma by modeling component anatomy, props, layout and styles as structured