AI and Design

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...

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...

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 whe...

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: 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/jeremybelc...

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 ne...

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://maggieappl...

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....

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...

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 "A...

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....

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-f...

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...

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...

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 Cod...

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, cog...

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...

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, b...

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 epis...

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 outp...

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....

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: The Figma Design Agent is Here | Fig...

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...

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,"...

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...