UT iSchool Alumni

Akanksha Garg

Lead Designer- Design Systems, Amazon Web Services

Current role: Lead Designer- Design Systems
Organization: Amazon Web Services
Degree: Master of Acience in information Science
Graduation year: 2022

About the Work

As a Senior UX Designer at AWS, I lead the design of Cloudscape — AWS’s open-source design system serving thousands of teams building cloud service consoles. I also lead the AI design direction, authoring patterns that shape how teams across AWS build intelligent interfaces, conversational AI, and coding agent experiences. What I love is that it’s architecture at a different scale. My training at UT Austin taught me to think in systems — how structure, modularity, and coherence create experiences that serve people. Design systems are exactly that: invisible infrastructure that works so well people don’t notice it. Every pattern I ship is a decision made once that reverberates across thousands of products and millions of end users. The relationship to our field is direct. Spatial reasoning, systematic thinking, understanding how humans navigate complex environments — these are architecture skills applied to a medium that desperately needs the rigor and humanity our training provides.

How the iSchool Prepared Them

The classes on research methods!

A Memorable iSchool Experience

Working as a student tech with Sam! His support was instrumental in helping me carve out the journey I’ve been on since!

Advice for Current Students

My advice: don’t worry too much about picking the “right” path early. I went from architecture to HCI to leading design infrastructure at AWS through moves I couldn’t have planned. The field is broader than it appears from inside the program, your training in research, systems thinking, and human-centered design is rare and in demand in places you might not expect, from design systems to AI strategy. Also, invest in the work that compounds. Write, publish, contribute to open source, build things that live beyond a class project. The work that shaped my career wasn’t the flashiest, it was the work where I thought carefully about how systems scale and how people actually experience them. And be patient with yourself. Career paths in HCI are nonlinear by nature. Trust the rigor of your training, even when the medium changes completely.