Hayley Hughes is a Design Director for Nike’s design systems. She formerly established the IBM Design Language, operationalized the Airbnb DLS, and led an evolution of Shopify’s Polaris Design System.
Hayley’s work has been featured in Women Who Design, Under Consideration, and “26 Innovations by 26 Women.” She is a certified IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Leader and contributed to the Adobe + Idean e-book, “Hack the Design System.”
Her philosophy is grounded in an idea she describes as system stewardship: the integrative practice of building systems from a deep understanding of human behavior, community, and culture. She shared her scaffolded model for a “Design System of Human Needs” around the world in 12 different countries and participated in webinars with Adobe, Invision, and Monotype.
Outside of design systems, Hayley works on Design Operations and helps organizations transform their cultures from solely feature + product focused to people + context focused by scaling inclusive practices.
