AI and Design
- Episódios
- 42
- Publicação
- semanal
- Último episódio
- 11 nov 2026
Sobre o podcast
Two Carnegie Mellon faculty explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of design. Each week, we'll break down the latest AI developments, dive deep into AI topics that matter to designers, and talk with fascinating guests who are right at the intersection of these fields.
All views expressed are our own and not reflective of Carnegie Mellon or the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
Episódios 42
New Product Launches, Fall 2026 Edition
Dan and Nik spend this episode trying out a batch of fall launches. First up are Kite and Open Design, two canvas-based workspaces where several people and several AI agents (Claude, Codex, Gemini, take your …
Notas do episódio
Dan and Nik spend this episode trying out a batch of fall launches. First up are Kite and Open Design, two canvas-based workspaces where several people and several AI agents (Claude, Codex, Gemini, take your pick) work on the same design file. Kite feels closer to Figma; Open Design runs locally and checks its output against a built-in “AI slop” checklist before handing it over. Figma, meanwhile, has rolled out Specs and Code Layers to everyone, so you can now start from a markdown spec, a mockup, or running code and move between all three on one canvas.
Google gets two segments. Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) now lets you review and rearrange an outline before it renders slides or video. That small checkpoint leads to a conversation about working at human speed instead of machine speed, Nik’s week of throwaway agent code (“slow is smooth, smooth is fast”), and Benedict Evans’ point that AI saves you nothing if checking its work takes longer than doing it yourself. Google AI Edge Foresight is an on-device meeting companion that ties your notes to a local index of your own documents. The episode closes with Artcraft, an open-source clean-room re-implementation of the Adobe Creative Suite, reportedly built in ten days.
LINKS
Kite
https://kite.newOpen Design
https://open-design.aiBuild by Design: Figma Specs and Code Layers (Figma Blog)
https://www.figma.com/blog/build-by-design/How to Shape Your Slides and Videos with Gemini Notebook (Google)
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-notebook/co-create-slides-videos/Google AI Edge Foresight
https://developers.google.com/edge/foresightArtCraft
https://getartcraft.comIllegible Design Systems, MIT Predicts Your Next Words, Experts Follow AI, and guest Nicole Donnelly
This week Nik and Dan look at what designers lose, and gain, when AI does more of the work. They start with Anton Sten’s essay on building a design system with an AI agent and no longer knowing it by heart, and …
Notas do episódio
This week Nik and Dan look at what designers lose, and gain, when AI does more of the work. They start with Anton Sten’s essay on building a design system with an AI agent and no longer knowing it by heart, and debate whether a better-documented system makes up for designers no longer carrying it in their heads. Next is an MIT paper from UIST 2026 that predicts what people will say next. Then they cover Anthropic’s study in which professional analysts went along with Claude Code’s secretly coin-flipped recommendations 86% of the time, often repeating its reasoning as their own. They discuss design responses: tracking which ideas came from the AI, having agents argue both sides, and asking for the human’s view before showing a recommendation.
In the second half, Nik talks with Nicole Donnelly, founder of AI Smart Ventures. She explains why teams learn faster when people across departments share how they use AI, why technical teams tend to overbuild and MVPs have to stay small, and why she thinks retiring shareable custom GPTs and Gems in favor of skills will shut out non-technical workers.
LINKS
The System I No Longer Know By Heart (Anton Sten)
https://www.antonsten.com/articles/the-system-i-no-longer-know-by-heart/Before You Say It: Anticipating Verbal Behavior from Longitudinal Everyday Conversations with LLMs (Samaradivakara, Danry, Liang, Maes)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13454How AI Agents Shape Experts’ Judgment Calls (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/research/agents-judgment-callsAI Smart Ventures
https://aismartventures.comStructured AI Context, How PMs are Being Affected by AI, A Conversation with Junior Designers
Episode 40 starts with a quick note that it’s launch week for Dan’s debut novel, The Restoration, then turns to the week’s news. Nik covers Anton Sten’s method for giving AI structured context with two markdown …
Notas do episódio
Episode 40 starts with a quick note that it’s launch week for Dan’s debut novel, The Restoration, then turns to the week’s news. Nik covers Anton Sten’s method for giving AI structured context with two markdown files: a chronological running-notes log and a stricter decisions log with the newest entries first. Dan then walks through Casey Winters’ interviews with product managers about how AI has changed their work. PMs are shipping more without matching business results, prioritization has to be relearned now that engineering scarcity no longer forces it, and trust in AI drops as PMs’ workflows get more sophisticated. Last, they discuss Ron Goldin’s case that “product designer” no longer describes a job, and his replacement of four attributes: Style, Strategy, Builder, and Operator.
In the second half, four recent CMU HCI graduates describe what entering the field is like right now. Lisa, Nava, and Qiyu work in design roles, and Sean is a PM. They talk about a brutal job market (Sean’s company got roughly 80,000 applicants for 14 new-grad roles) and about roles blending as designers write PRDs and PRs they can’t fully verify. They also talk about mentorship increasingly coming from engineers, LinkedIn, and Claude itself. Their organizations handle AI very differently: one product team has banned AI-written PRDs because everyone’s agents reached the same conclusions, while elsewhere design is the last step still done by hand. Their advice to students and educators: learn by doing, build with AI out of curiosity rather than FOMO, keep returning to first principles, and make sure you are the one who actually understands the work.
LINKS
Dan's debut AI novel The Restoration
https://mybook.to/TheRestoration2176Where Decisions Live – Anton Sten
https://www.antonsten.com/articles/where-decisions-live/How PM Work Is Changing in the AI Era – Casey Winters
https://www.caseyaccidental.com/p/how-pm-work-is-changing-in-the-aiProduct Designer Is No Longer a Job Description – Ron Goldin
https://rongoldin.substack.com/p/product-designer-is-no-longer-a-jobGartner Hype Cycle
https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycleOpenAI's Intelligent UI, Facebook's Your Algorithm, AI Relationship Quality (ARQ)
Fresh off their first live show, Nik and Dan look at three stories about who gets to shape what AI shows us. First up is OpenAI’s Intelligent UI, which lets GPT-6 build small interactive interfaces (charts …
Notas do episódio
Fresh off their first live show, Nik and Dan look at three stories about who gets to shape what AI shows us. First up is OpenAI’s Intelligent UI, which lets GPT-6 build small interactive interfaces (charts, forms, buttons, maps) inline in ChatGPT instead of returning a wall of text. They compare it to Claude Artifacts, argue that speed is what makes it usable as a default, and ask what happens when companies like QuickBooks have to hand over a design system for their product to show up inside someone else’s chat window. Is ChatGPT becoming an operating system that generates apps on demand, across the silos our tasks currently live in?
Next, Facebook’s “Your Algorithm” lets people steer their Feed and Reels in plain language. Dan draws on his time at Twitter and the promise of Bluesky’s algorithm marketplace; Nik wonders whether more control might raise engagement rather than lower it, and how this data could feed Meta’s Muse agents. Finally, UserTesting has rebranded as Auros and is pivoting toward AI training and evaluation with verified human experts. Its new AI Relationship Quality (ARQ) benchmark measures trust, affinity, and control alongside technical performance, which leads to a frank conversation about why benchmark gains don’t always produce models that are pleasant to work with, and whether ARQ could become the NPS of AI.
LINKS
OpenAI Wants ChatGPT to Stop Looking Like a Chatbot (Gizmodo)
https://gizmodo.com/openai-wants-chatgpt-to-stop-looking-like-a-chatbot-2000823211
Facebook Is Giving Users More Control Over Their Algorithm (TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/13/facebook-is-giving-users-more-control-over-their-algorithm/
UserTesting Rebrands as Auros, Aims to Bring Humans into AI Experience (Constellation Research)
Auros Adds ‘Human Elements’ to AI Evaluation (Daily Research News)
https://www.mrweb.com/drno/news40429.htm
Dan’s debut AI novel The Restoration (2176, Book One)
Live at IxDA Pittsburgh - How to be a designer in 2027
This week, Dan and Nik recorded live at the IxDA Pittsburgh meetup. We discuss how we are thinking about being designers in the future, what we are teaching students, and what tools we are using. We take …
Notas do episódio
This week, Dan and Nik recorded live at the IxDA Pittsburgh meetup. We discuss how we are thinking about being designers in the future, what we are teaching students, and what tools we are using. We take audience questions and hear about how these professional designers are working with AI today.
The Fastest Gun in the West, Multiplayer AI, Serious AI Products & Jeremy Belcher
The Fastest Gun in the West: https://www.doc.cc/articles/fastest-gunWe're building multiplayer AI. Here's what we've learned so far: https://newsletter.posthog.com/p/were-building-multiplayer-ai-heresWhat would …
Notas do episódio
The Fastest Gun in the West: https://www.doc.cc/articles/fastest-gun
We're building multiplayer AI. Here's what we've learned so far: https://newsletter.posthog.com/p/were-building-multiplayer-ai-heres
What would a serious AI product look like? https://blog.glyph.im/2026/09/serious-ai-product.html
Jeremy Belcher
Robot Heart - www.robotheart.studio
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremybelcherAI Sychophancy with Steve Rathje
This week Dan and Nik sit down with Steve Rathje, a new HCII colleague who runs CMU's Psychology of Technology Lab, to talk about what sycophantic AI does to the people using it. Steve's team randomly assigned …
Notas do episódio
This week Dan and Nik sit down with Steve Rathje, a new HCII colleague who runs CMU's Psychology of Technology Lab, to talk about what sycophantic AI does to the people using it. Steve's team randomly assigned people to chat with bots that were flattering, disagreeable, or neutral. People liked the flatterers, shrugged at the neutral ones, and hated the bots that pushed back.
For designers, the news is mixed. Validation drives enjoyment, but cherry-picked facts do the persuading, so pairing a little warmth with opposing evidence makes disagreement easier to take (at some cost to its persuasive punch). The bad news: across six studies from three research teams, teaching people about sycophancy through warnings, videos, or quizzes made the chatbot seem less trustworthy but no less persuasive. That puts the little "AI can make mistakes" disclaimer in an unflattering light. We also cover AI dark patterns, whether the right dose of sycophancy depends on the task, and Dan's random idea of a group chat of dueling AI personalities.
Plus, Nik explains Jev and the new class of fast, cheap "System One" decision models, and we look at pieces from Microsoft and DoorDash design teams on why AI evals should measure what users experience as well as what models get right.
LINKS
Jev decision model touted as quicker, cheaper LLM alternative (TechTarget)
https://www.techtarget.com/it-infrastructure/news/366650696/Jev-decision-model-touted-as-quicker-cheaper-LLM-alternativePutting the user back into AI Evaluation (Microsoft Design)
https://microsoft.design/articles/putting-the-user-back-into-ai-evaluation/Building AI Evals: Who Gets to Decide What’s Good? (Doordash Design)
https://medium.com/design-doordash/building-ai-evals-who-gets-to-decide-whats-good-39671385f50dSycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence (Rathje et al.)
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vmyek_v1/Observing sycophantic AI validate others reduces its appeal but not its persuasiveness (Ye, Kraut & Rathje)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25166v1Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we're doing about it (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/Silicon sycophants: the effects of computers that flatter (Fogg & Nass, 1997)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581996901044Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective (Chan & Sengupta, 2010)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1509/jmkr.47.1.122On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4 (Salvi et al., Nature Human Behaviour)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02194-6@Grok Is This True? LLM-Powered Fact-Checking on Social Media (Renault, Mosleh & Rand)
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/85quw_v1Steve Rathje's website
https://stevenrathje.com/Steve Psychology on TikTok
https://www.tiktok.com/@stevepsychologyGoogle CC, Controlling Image Generators, and Planning with Agents
This week we talk about Google's new CC agent for managing family tasks, some techniques to control image generators when you want to constrain certain elements, and a deep article on planning with AI …
Notas do episódio
This week we talk about Google's new CC agent for managing family tasks, some techniques to control image generators when you want to constrain certain elements, and a deep article on planning with AI agents.
Show Notes- https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/18/googles-new-cc-is-an-ai-agent-that-helps-families-run-their-households/
- https://trpevski.com/blog/image-model-decide-everything
- https://maggieappleton.com/planning-agents
- Mai Lee Chang, Alicia (Hyun Jin) Lee, Nara Han, Anna Huang, Hugo Simão, Samantha Reig, Abdullah Ubed Mohammad Ali, Rebekah Martinez, Neeta M Khanuja, John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, and Aaron Steinfeld. 2024. Dynamic Agent Affiliation: Who Should the AI Agent Work for in the Older Adult's Care Network? In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1774–1788. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661500
ShiftUX workshop: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/workshops/designing-ai-for-humans
ShiftUX talk: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/program/day-2-turing-machines/
Dan's ShiftUX Discount Code: SAFFER-SHIFT26
Apple's Siri AI and Audio Intelligence, Project Solaris, Miro Sale, AI Tool Building
In this episode, Dan and Nik unpack Apple's big announcements from its latest event, starting with Siri AI: now a dedicated app with personal context indexing, on-screen awareness, and in-app actions, launching …
Notas do episódio
In this episode, Dan and Nik unpack Apple's big announcements from its latest event, starting with Siri AI: now a dedicated app with personal context indexing, on-screen awareness, and in-app actions, launching in beta with iOS 27 . They dig into the promise and limitations of Apple-only app integration, the EU regulatory lockout, and what daily usage caps signal about Apple's services ambitions. The conversation gets more charged around Audio Intelligence, Apple's new always-on listening features for the Apple Watch, including live audio rewind and Siri Recap summaries of real-world conversations. Dan and Nik wrestle with the surveillance implications, the absence of any on-device indicator, and whether this crosses a line — particularly in two-party consent states like Pennsylvania and California.
The back half covers Runway's Project Solaris, a generative UI concept that uses its video model to render fully interactive, pixel-based interfaces with no underlying code. Dan sees echoes of Microsoft's Bob-era skeuomorphism and questions whether it misunderstands fifty years of HCI; Nik finds more to like in its challenge to the sameness of modern app design. They then turn to the surprise sale of Miro to Bending Spoons for $1.36 billion — a 90% haircut from its 2021 peak valuation — and what it means when a profitable, hundred-million-user company gets absorbed into a portfolio known for maintaining but not advancing its acquisitions.
The episode closes with a discussion of Benedict Evans' essay "AI, Tools and Transformation," which argues that the Silicon Valley vision of everyone rolling their own SaaS tools misunderstands how most people think about their work.LINKS
Introducing Solaris
https://runway.com/news/research/introducing-solaris
Bending Spoons to buy collaboration tools maker Miro for $1.36B, 90% less than its 2022 valuation
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/10/bending-spoons-to-buy-collaboration-tools-maker-miro-for-1-36b-90-less-than-its-2022-valuation/
AI, Tools and Transformation (Benedict Evans)
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2026/9/3/ai-tools-and-transformationMobbin MCP, Perplexity and Nvidia Local AI Agent, Design Ledgers
This week on AI and design, we highlight the release of Mobbin's MCP, Perplexity and NVIDIA's local AI agent, and the concept of design ledgers. Dan also has some new speaking engagements you can join coming …
Notas do episódio
This week on AI and design, we highlight the release of Mobbin's MCP, Perplexity and NVIDIA's local AI agent, and the concept of design ledgers. Dan also has some new speaking engagements you can join coming up.
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction to AI and Design
- 01:11 Upcoming Speaking Engagements
- 04:44 Mobbin's MCP Release
- 11:34 Perplexity and NVIDIA's Local AI Agent
- 23:54 The Concept of Design Ledgers
Show Notes
- https://mobbin.com/mcp
- https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/perplexity-partners-with-nvidia-to-launch-portable-computer-a-fully-local-ai-agent-with-zero-token-costs
- https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/the-ledger-of-design
Dan's Speaking Engagements
ShiftUX workshop: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/workshops/designing-ai-for-humans
ShiftUX talk: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/program/day-2-turing-machines/
Dan's ShiftUX Discount Code: SAFFER-SHIFT26
Chicago Camps' Leadership by Design: https://chicagocamps.org/event/leadership-by-design-2026/Figma Make Time Savings, LLM Bias Affects Designers, Target's AI/UX Bid, EasyCircuit
Nik and Dan open the fall semester with a look at how their own courses have been rebuilt around AI this year. Nik's third run of AI Augmented Designer now leans hard into professional software development …
Notas do episódio
Nik and Dan open the fall semester with a look at how their own courses have been rebuilt around AI this year. Nik's third run of AI Augmented Designer now leans hard into professional software development practice. Dan is teaching Designing for AI Products and Services, an Advanced Interaction Design Studio reworked around AI-ready design systems, and a new independent study with Brad Myers on "AI widgets" — what happens when scroll bars, cut-and-paste, and other decades-old microinteractions get smarter.
This week’s news: Figma's randomized controlled trial on Figma Make found roughly 20% time savings, but Nik pushes on whether a 52-minute task dropping to 45 minutes actually feels different, or whether the real gain is more iteration cycles. Maud Benaddi's article on bias in LLMs prompts a discussion of how training-data skew shows up in generated personas, AI-assisted copy, and flattened qualitative research summaries; Nik connects it to Liz Gerber's exercise having students generate personas of themselves and watch the class recoil. Target's appointment of its first chief AI officer, Chandhu Nair, alongside Purvi Shah as SVP of UX, gets read as a welcome sign of AI and UX paired around real operational value rather than an AI strategy for its own sake. We close on EasyCircuit, a new app for vibe-coding hardware prototypes — fun, promising, and, as Nik found when a wiring render would have let the blue smoke out, a reminder that basic usability QA still matters.
LINKS
Measuring Time Savings From Figma Make
https://www.figma.com/blog/measuring-time-savings-from-figma-make/
Bias in LLMs, or how to design for everyone with tools built for someone — Maud Benaddi
Target Strengthens AI and UX Capabilities to Power Its Next Chapter of Growthhttps://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2026/08/chandhu-nair-purvi-shah
EasyCircuit
Dr. Liz Gerber’s LinkedIn post
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elizgerber_ai-builds-cardboard-cutouts-of-people-not-share-7440452615232024576-aS5k/Deep Dive: Andy Budd on the Future of the Design Industry
Andy Budd — reformed designer, coach to design leaders, and advisor at VC fund Seedcamp — joins Nik and Dan for a wide-ranging conversation about whether the design industry is about to boom or bust. Andy …
Notas do episódio
Andy Budd — reformed designer, coach to design leaders, and advisor at VC fund Seedcamp — joins Nik and Dan for a wide-ranging conversation about whether the design industry is about to boom or bust. Andy argues we hit "peak designer" around 2021–22, and that we're now in an era of Schrödinger's design and nobody has opened the box. The bull case is that AI hands designers the means of production. No more petitioning product managers for backlog space or begging engineering for a prototype — designers can spot the debt, fix it, and ship it. The bear case is that everyone else got there first. Product managers can now design, engineers can now do discovery, and design shrivels down to a five-person team babysitting the design system for a 300-person engineering org.
We talk about taste of course, but Andy points out that everyone thinks they have taste. He also revisits his poker-versus-chess framing — designers study the board and hate mistakes while their peers just want to play every hand. We end on a genuinely unsettled note about the industry itself. How are your house painting skills?
LINKS
The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/07/bull-and-bear-case-digital-design-age-ai/
The Six Levels of Adaptive Software
https://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/06/the-six-levels-of-adaptive-softwareAI and the Mangrove Problem
https://andybudd.com/archives/2025/09/ai-and-the-mangrove-problemThe Growth Equation book
https://www.andybudd.com/book/design + AI Summit — Brighton Dome, 24–25 September 2026
https://designplusaisummit.com/Andy Budd's blog
https://www.andybudd.com/Smilla’s Sense of Snow book
https://amzn.to/4znTIPtPattern Recognition book
https://amzn.to/4znk9F5Summer 2026 Hot Takes
This week, Dan and Nik make some hot takes on news that has come out this summer.Everyone's work is starting to look the same: https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/everyones-work-is-starting-to-lookLLMs …
Notas do episódio
This week, Dan and Nik make some hot takes on news that has come out this summer.
Everyone's work is starting to look the same: https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/everyones-work-is-starting-to-look
LLMs reward expertise: https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/
A Properties Panel and Annotations, Now in Figma Make: https://www.figma.com/blog/properties-panel-and-annotations-now-in-figma-make/
Unpacking ChatGPT Work: the Agent for a Billion Users: https://www.latent.space/p/unpacking-chatgpt-work
Agent Behavior (agentbehavior.dev)
Measuring the UX of AI: https://measuringu.com/measuring-the-ux-of-ai/
Type designers have created a free font that "poisons" AI: https://www.creativebloq.com/design/fonts-typography/type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-ai
LinkedIn's new anti-slop button is coming to every platform: https://www.fastcompany.com/91584892/linkedins-new-anti-slop-button-is-coming-to-every-platform
How writers are reacting to Substack’s AI transparency tools: https://on.substack.com/p/how-writers-are-reacting-to-substacksDeep Dive: 2026 Figma AI Report with Figma's Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston
Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston of Figma join Dan and Nik to unpack Figma's 2026 AI report. The headline is about AI shifting from individual productivity to team dynamics: 41% now say AI meaningfully changes …
Notas do episódio
Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston of Figma join Dan and Nik to unpack Figma's 2026 AI report. The headline is about AI shifting from individual productivity to team dynamics: 41% now say AI meaningfully changes how their teams work together, up from 7% two years ago. Shane and Andrew deliberately interrogate the "10x everybody" narrative: output is measurably up (lines of code, App Store submissions), but outcomes aren't following, because AI is exposing the communication and alignment seams that were always there. Handoffs can still be an issue. Prototypes are trivial to generate but very hard to dissect. And perhaps unsurprisingly, decision-making turns out to be the real bottleneck.
The conversation also covers the blurring of roles (designers shipping fully functional AI-built prototypes jumped from ~10% to 61% in a year; developers doing design work is up sharply) and why developers are now among the loudest voices arguing design matters more. Andrew and Shane reframe role overlap as tax reduction rather than job-stealing — the designer who fixes the visual bug instead of filing the ticket — and make the case for the canvas as shared context, for design systems as the thing "orchestrating relationships" between functions, and for the four shapes of AI adoption (the nascent group has roughly halved to 18%).
LINKS
Figma's 2026 AI Report — blog post
Training Taste, AI Systems Thinking, LLM Counter Defaults, and special guest Dan Maccarone
Everyone in design is yelling the same two words right now: taste and judgment. But how do you get them? David Hoang's "Training Design Senses" does, and this episode starts there: how to train the eye, design …
Notas do episódio
Everyone in design is yelling the same two words right now: taste and judgment. But how do you get them? David Hoang's "Training Design Senses" does, and this episode starts there: how to train the eye, design dexterity, fluency of aesthetics, and rhetoric, with a detour into what copying from masters means when the copying happens through an AI. Then Christine Zhu on systems thinking for agentic products, which asks PMs to stop shipping features and start gardening: decompose for agent experience, define contracts between the parts, build feedback loops that capture correction signals. Our last bit of news is LLM Counter-Defaults from Nadia Piet and AIxDESIGN, a slider-based tool that exposes the settings your LLM shipped with and writes the instructions to override them.
Our guest is Dan Maccarone, founder and CEO of Charming Robot, who spent a year rebuilding his studio's entire design process around AI after a project went sideways. He walks us through the experience brief (a PRD with a friendlier name), the whiteboard/review/approved branch structure, and what he calls high-speed mediocrity. He also explains why the prototype's 300,000 lines of code are never shipping anywhere, why documentation matters more now rather than less, and why his team still starts with sketching so they're building from their imagination instead of Claude's.
LINKS"Training design senses"
https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/training-design-senses”what systems thinking looks like for PM'ing AI products”
https://open.substack.com/pub/christinezhu/p/grow-systems-build-features?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webLLM Counter-Defaults by Nadia Piet / AIxDESIGN
https://counterdefaults.aixdesign.co/Thinking in Systems book
https://amzn.to/4wuNA6oHow Buildings Learn book
https://amzn.to/4g2Y99V"Never mind the prompts, here's the thinking"
https://uxdesign.cc/never-mind-the-prompts-heres-the-thinking-f4af4b92155fCharming Robot
https://charmingrobot.comStory in a Bottle podcast
https://storyinabottle.charmingrobot.com/The Barstool MBA (Audible)
https://amzn.to/4pGRZ3qFool's Gold, NYC
https://www.foolsgoldnyc.com/MHCI Capstone sponsorship
https://hcii.cmu.edu/academics/mhci/capstoneBye Bye Purple Gradients: OpenAI's Design Push. Plus special guests: fuguUX
Dan and Nik dig into a trio of OpenAI stories: the launch of GPT 5.6 Sol and its jump to the top of the Design Arena leaderboard, notably by suppressing common AI design anti-patterns (goodbye, purple …
Notas do episódio
Dan and Nik dig into a trio of OpenAI stories: the launch of GPT 5.6 Sol and its jump to the top of the Design Arena leaderboard, notably by suppressing common AI design anti-patterns (goodbye, purple gradients) and combining known templates with customized outputs — followed by Figma Make's OpenAI integration and what it might signal about the shifting model landscape. They also geek out over Codex Micro, OpenAI's slick new macro keyboard designed by Work Louder, which uses RGB-lit keys to let developers monitor and control multiple coding agents without touching a mouse.
The episode's guest segment features Jason Hong and Sauvik Das, CMU HCII faculty and co-founders of fuguUX, an AI-powered usability auditing tool. Jason and Sauvik explain how frontier language models can now scale subjective design judgment — evaluating concepts like information scent that were previously impossible to codify — and walk through their two offerings: synthetic user testing (with a diverse cast of twenty AI agents built from Census microdata) and automated heuristic audits. The conversation touches on why B2B software remains so dreadful, the testing pyramid, and the long-term vision of continuously self-improving websites.
LINKS
Design Arena
https://www.designarena.ai/GPT 5.6 Sol topping the design leaderboard
https://notes.designarena.ai/how-openais-sol-finally-learned-design-taste/Codex Micro
https://openai.com/supply/co-lab/work-louder/Figma Make + OpenAI integration announcement
https://www.figma.com/blog/gpt-5-6-is-now-available-in-figma-make/
fuguUX
https://www.fuguux.com/2026 Thus Far: 7 Big Themes
Dan and Nik pause at the halfway mark of 2026 to reflect on 25 episodes, 10 guests, and a wild six months in AI and design. Fresh off a week of building apps with Fable — Dan's ambient bird-listening app for …
Notas do episódio
Dan and Nik pause at the halfway mark of 2026 to reflect on 25 episodes, 10 guests, and a wild six months in AI and design. Fresh off a week of building apps with Fable — Dan's ambient bird-listening app for AirPods, Nik's long-running multi-agent builds — they revisit the year's biggest themes: the collapse of fidelity and whether wireframes still matter, taste as the designer's (maybe) moat, cognitive surrender and the strange compulsion to keep feeding the machine, canvas versus code as Figma and Claude Design converge, designing for agents when your next user isn't human, the rise of markdown skills (and the ick of scraped design systems), the path for junior designers, and why user research may be the most undervalued discipline of the AI era.
LINKS
Scraped Styles MD repository
https://styles.refero.design/
Reverse Centaurs Are the Answer to the AI Paradox
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/Aaron Draplin Takes On a Logo Design Challenge
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/aaron-draplin-takes-on-a-logo-design-challenge
How tech workers are feeling in 2026
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026
Why using AI leads to Brain Fry
https://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fryClaude Design 2.0, Quality Bars, Layers of AI Experience, Perplexity Brain
Nik and Dan catch up on the news out of Figma Config 2026 — where generative plugins stole the show for Nik (build them with tokens, run them for free) — before digging into Anthropic's big Claude Design 2.0 …
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Nik and Dan catch up on the news out of Figma Config 2026 — where generative plugins stole the show for Nik (build them with tokens, run them for free) — before digging into Anthropic's big Claude Design 2.0 overhaul, with canvas editing, design-system imports, a two-way round-trip with Claude Code, and a fix for its token-burning problem. From there: MC Dean asks who actually owns the quality bar when anyone can ship, Emily Campbell reimagines the layers of UX for probabilistic AI systems (goblins included), and Perplexity's new Brain points toward self-improving memory for agents. Plus a detour into AI memory, forgetting, and one very confused Claude that thought the show got renamed. Stick around for news on Dan's forthcoming sci-fi novel.
Show notes:
- Anthropic ships Claude Design 2.0 (VentureBeat): https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-ships-major-claude-design-overhaul-with-design-system-imports-code-round-trips-and-a-fix-for-its-token-burning-problem
- MC Dean, "Who Sets the Quality Bar?": https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/who-sets-the-quality-bar
- Emily Campbell, "Layers of AI Experience": https://emilycampbell.co/writing/layers-of-ai-experience
- Perplexity, "Self-Improving Memory for Agents" (Brain): https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/self-improving-memory-for-agents
- Dave Song, "Control over Context" — user-led memory management concepts: https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/control-over-context-44d975e92efc
- Dan's upcoming novel, The Restoration (D.S. Duffy): https://dsduffy.com/
Hot Takes and Big Themes from Config 2026
Dan reports live from Figma's Config 2026 conference in San Francisco, talking with seven design leaders — Peter Merholz, Jesse James Garrett, Greg Petroff, Ryan Freitas, Kim Lenox, Alice Quan, and Emily …
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Dan reports live from Figma's Config 2026 conference in San Francisco, talking with seven design leaders — Peter Merholz, Jesse James Garrett, Greg Petroff, Ryan Freitas, Kim Lenox, Alice Quan, and Emily Campbell — about the keynote, major announcements like Code Layers and Weave, and the vibe on the floor. The conversations circle a few big tensions: Figma's push into Adobe's territory (motion, brand, marketing) versus doubling down on AI-to-code workflows where competitors like Claude Design are gaining ground, the shrinking of design teams, and how designers can stay strategic by leaning into craft, taste, and curiosity. Off-stage, the mood was one of cautious adaptation — less panic than last year, more pragmatic grappling with what roles, tools, and identities look like now.
Siri AI, A New Interaction-Focused AI Lab, Four Design AI Jobs, Perplexity Computer Research
A year ago the consensus was that AI would hurt Apple. Last week at WWDC they showed up with a real Siri AI, the privacy story nobody else can match, and the $$$ hardware to run it. The "AI for the rest of us" …
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A year ago the consensus was that AI would hurt Apple. Last week at WWDC they showed up with a real Siri AI, the privacy story nobody else can match, and the $$$ hardware to run it. The "AI for the rest of us" play might just work. Dan and Nik dig into what Apple actually shipped, why App Intents matter for designers, and the gut-punch reality that your year-old iPhone won't run it.
Also this episode: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is building a design-led AI lab, and nobody can quite figure out what it's selling. Sarah Gibbons maps the four design jobs AI has created so far. And Perplexity's research with Harvard Business School claims agents can cut task time by up to 92% — with enough caveats to fill a show.
LINKS
Secret AI Lab News
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-plans-to-start-a-new-ai-company
The Four Design Jobs AI Created (So Far)
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-jobs-ai-created/Perplexity/HBS Research
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07489
Thinking Machines Demo Video
https://youtu.be/A12AVongNN4?si=ODvSCf9IKTzwBiiUCopilot Redesign, Is AI ever Done, Amazon Proteus, Miro's Head of AI Design Mark Boyes-Smith
Dan and Nik dig into Microsoft's sweeping redesign of 365 Copilot , transforming the prompt box into a task-aware workspace, leaning into progressive disclosure, and positioning AI as an embedded layer across …
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Dan and Nik dig into Microsoft's sweeping redesign of 365 Copilot , transforming the prompt box into a task-aware workspace, leaning into progressive disclosure, and positioning AI as an embedded layer across Word, Excel, and Outlook rather than a bolt-on feature. They also discuss Jeff Gothelf's argument that "done" means something fundamentally different for AI products, where probabilistic outputs require teams to write acceptance criteria as distributions and build failure triage into launch rather than after. Rounding out the news: Amazon's Proteus warehouse robots can now take natural-language direction from human workers, and a Salesforce designer shares how her team is mastering AI tools through peer-to-peer learning, a dynamic that gives Dan flashbacks to the early days of the web.
Then Nik sits down with Mark Boyes-Smith, Head of AI Design at Miro, for a deep look at how one of the world's largest collaboration platforms is integrating AI at every layer. Mark walks through Miro's new Sidekicks and Flows features, including voice interaction and custom connectors, and talks candidly about how his distributed design team rapid-prototypes in code, branches and remixes ideas, and builds conviction before shipping. He also shares his thinking on designing for long-running agentic tasks, the coming challenge of multi-agent orchestration on an infinite canvas, and what resilience and "product taste" mean for designers navigating an era of relentless change.
LINKS
Microsoft Copilot 365 Redesign
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/05/28/introducing-a-new-design-for-microsoft-365-copilot/
What “done” means when you’re shipping AI features
https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/what-done-means-when-youre-shipping-ai-features/Amazon's new Proteus warehouse robot
https://www.engadget.com/2187338/amazons-new-proteus-warehouse-robot-is-fully-autonomous/
Designing how designers master AI
https://uxdesign.cc/designing-how-designers-master-ai-642d8751d945
New Miro Features at Canvas26
https://www.youtube.com/live/qM-KxCr4I5I?si=HGtSokg95B9kO5k9
Figma and Stitch Updates, Design Memory, Fraude Design, Quilter CEO Sergiy Nesterenko
Updates to Figma and Google Stitchhttps://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-codehttps://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stitch-updates/The Design System Advantage is …
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Updates to Figma and Google Stitch
https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-code
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stitch-updates/
The Design System Advantage is Memory
https://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memory
Fraude Design
https://fraude.design/
Nik's Interview with CEO of Quilter, Sergiy Nesterenko
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/
https://www.quilter.ai/Figma Design Agent, 2026 AI in Design Report, Synthetic Customers, Llewyn Paine on UXR
This week we talk about Figma's new design agent integrated right on the canvas, the 2026 State of AI in Design Report, and Bain's experiment with synthetic customers. Then Dan interview Llewyn Paine about the …
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This week we talk about Figma's new design agent integrated right on the canvas, the 2026 State of AI in Design Report, and Bain's experiment with synthetic customers. Then Dan interview Llewyn Paine about the future of UXR and design and gives a preview of the Rosenfeld Designing with AI Conference 2026 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/
Show Notes:AI Originality, Bolt-on AI, Special Guest: Fin's VP of Product Design Thom Rimmer
When you collaborate with AI on a piece of work, whose thinking is it, really? That question runs underneath what a lot of designers and creatives are arguing about right now, and this week on AI and Design …
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When you collaborate with AI on a piece of work, whose thinking is it, really? That question runs underneath what a lot of designers and creatives are arguing about right now, and this week on AI and Design, Nik and Dan dig in.
We start with Giorgio Schirò's "The thinking was never just mine," which uses Andy Clark and David Chalmers' "extended mind" theory to argue that creativity has always been distributed: our taste comes from books, films, teachers, and a thousand inputs we don't normally count. AI doesn't invent this loop; it just makes it faster and leaves receipts. Then we turn to Revanth Krishna's "Don't Simply Bolt On AI, Rethink From the Ground Up," using Anthropic's new Claude for Small Business as a worked example of what AI-native enterprise software might actually look like — and what trust and brand mean when the AI inside your tool isn't built by the company whose name is on the box.
Our guest is Thom Rimmer, VP of Product Design at Fin. Thom tells the story of how his company decided, over a single weekend in late 2022, to bet the entire business on AI and rebuild from the ground up. We get into what that did to the org: 95% of PRs now authored by Claude Code, designers shipping production code, the design system's source of truth moving from Figma to markdown files, and what's left of the design job when the artifacts get cheap.
LINKS
UI for AI
https://uiforai.design
The Thinking Was Never Just Mine
https://uxdesign.cc/the-thinking-was-never-just-mine-9b73cc04c837Don’t simply bolt on AI. Rethink from the ground up.
https://uxdesign.cc/dont-simply-bolt-on-ai-rethink-from-the-ground-up-ae73a9093cd2
Introducing Claude for Small Business
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business
Operator
https://fin.ai/operatorCognitive Surrender, Speed isn't The Bottleneck, and special guest PM Thomas Groendal
Wharton researchers fed people AI-generated answers, half of them deliberately wrong. The participants accepted them 73% of the time — and their confidence went up. They're calling it "cognitive surrender." Nik …
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Wharton researchers fed people AI-generated answers, half of them deliberately wrong. The participants accepted them 73% of the time — and their confidence went up. They're calling it "cognitive surrender." Nik and Dan dig into what separates it from plain old cognitive offloading, and the design moves that might pull people back.
Then: Ethan Ding's "Claude Code Is Not Making Your Product Better," and why taste, not coding speed, is the bottleneck for product quality.
Finally, Tom Groendal, Senior Product Manager at CACI's DarkBlue Intelligence Group, on what AI actually looks like inside a working product team: melting role boundaries, a "product brain" repo that doubles as institutional memory, and the new role that keeps surfacing in conversation after conversation — the context manager.
LINKSThinking - Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646Cognitive Surrender
https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/Creative Tools: The Case for Keeping AI Unfinished
https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/creative-tools-the-case-for-keeping-ai-unfinished-80c601821b53claude code is not making your product better
https://ethanding.substack.com/p/claude-code-is-not-making-your-product
Obviously Awesome (book)
https://amzn.to/433nIkRAgent Users, New Design Team Structures, Team Dynamics, AI Chat Problems, Constraints Not Prompts
Dan and Nik talk about how to design for your next user being an agent, the impact of AI on team structure and dynamics, the challenge of memory and recall in conversation-based AI systems, and the shift …
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Dan and Nik talk about how to design for your next user being an agent, the impact of AI on team structure and dynamics, the challenge of memory and recall in conversation-based AI systems, and the shift towards AI experience design focused on constraints, not prompts.
Chapters
- 00:00 Your Next User is an Agent
- 12:23 Rethinking the Shape of Design Teams in AI World
- 17:03 The Impact of AI Efficiency on Team Interactions
- 24:39 The Forgotten Conversation Problem in AI
- 31:14 The End of Prompting: AI Experience Design with Constraints
LINKS
Your product has a new user. It’s not human.
https://www.elenaverna.com/p/your-product-has-a-new-user-its-not
Rethinking the shape of design teams in an AI world
https://uxdesign.cc/rethinking-the-shape-of-design-teams-in-an-ai-world-82f986bf9a27The “Bug-Free” Workforce: How AI Efficiency Is Subtly Disrupting The Interactions That Build Strong Teams
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/bug-free-workforce-ai-disrupting-teams/
The forgotten conversation problem in AI chat
https://uxdesign.cc/the-forgotten-conversation-problem-in-ai-chat-4d3d0c3ea525
The End of Prompting: Why the Future of AI Experience Design Is Constraint-First
Deep Dive: AI Skills (with Google's MC Dean)
Google's MC Dean, the author of over 100 AI skills for designers on everything from accessibility to moods, joins Nik and Dan to talk about Skills: how to make them, how to use them, and what the future of them …
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Google's MC Dean, the author of over 100 AI skills for designers on everything from accessibility to moods, joins Nik and Dan to talk about Skills: how to make them, how to use them, and what the future of them could be.
LINKS
MC Dean on Substack
https://marieclairedean.substack.com/
MC Dean on Github
https://github.com/owl-listener
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman book
https://amzn.to/4sYGQekClaude Design, Innovative AI and Design Research from CHI 2026
Surprise surprise, Dan and Nik talk about Anthropic's launch of Claude Design. The Nik does a set of rapid-fire interviews from the 2026 CHI conference, featuring the latest HCI research in AI and Design.
Insights from Anthropic's Head of Design, Why AI UX Sucks, AI Aesthetics, Human-Centered Design 2.0
Dan checks out a Fast Company interview with Anthropic's Head of Design Joel Lewenstein and finds reasons for hope. Dmitry Kargaev points out the flaws of AI UX and has some reasons for why is happens. A …
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Dan checks out a Fast Company interview with Anthropic's Head of Design Joel Lewenstein and finds reasons for hope. Dmitry Kargaev points out the flaws of AI UX and has some reasons for why is happens. A catalog of AI brand archetypes, and Dan applauds Patrizia Bertini's call to rethink Human-Centered Design to be less about "users" and more about "citizens."
Links:
Fast Company Interview with Joel Lewenstein
https://www.fastcompany.com/91519289/inside-anthropics-biggest-design-choices
AI Products Have Terrible UX: Here's Why
https://hackernoon.com/ai-products-have-terrible-ux-heres-why
Aesthetics of AI
https://www.acolorbright.com/en/insights/aesthetics-of-ai
Human-Centred Design has grown up. It’s time we did too
https://uxdesign.cc/human-centred-design-has-grown-up-it-is-time-we-did-too-766601c1fc7d
We're All Doing The Same Job Now
https://odannyboy.medium.com/were-all-doing-the-same-job-now-81924e0c80d6
The Existential Designer
Deep Dive: The Future of Design Practice and Process (with author Mike Kuniavsky)
Dan, Nik, and special guest Mike Kuniavsky ("Observing the User Experience") do a deep dive into the impact of AI on the traditional design practice and process. They get into the disappearing/evolving role of …
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Dan, Nik, and special guest Mike Kuniavsky ("Observing the User Experience") do a deep dive into the impact of AI on the traditional design practice and process. They get into the disappearing/evolving role of design artifacts, the influence of AI on design literacy, and the reevaluation of the design process in the age of AI. AI has triggered the democratization of design tools, a shift in organizational power dynamics, and ofttimes the complete disregard for of unknown unknowns. They also explore the changing product risk surface, the redefinition of scale in design practice, and the role of synthetic users in user-centered design.
LINKS:Mike's article "Design practice assumes a world that no longer exists: what’s next?" https://medium.com/@mikekuniavsky/design-practice-assumes-a-world-that-no-longer-exists-whats-next-ca3f588ad4d8
Other recent articles on Design Process:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-process-isnt-dead/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-process-isnt-dead/
https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/the-new-design-process-2-6-2b5967507263
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/design-process-isnt-dead-its-only-thing-save-us-rick-starbuck-7pbmc/
“Cognitive surrender” leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/research-finds-ai-users-scarily-willing-to-surrender-their-cognition-to-llms/
Aqui estão os 40 episódios mais recentes de 42. Os mais antigos estão no feed do podcast.
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