Advertise on podcast: AI and Design

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) https://www.constellationr.com/insights/news/usertesting-rebrands-auros-aims-bring-humans-ai-experience 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) https://link.amazon/B05GcHBe7

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/jeremybelcher

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-alternative Putting 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-39671385f50d Sycophantic 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/2607.25166v1 Sycophancy 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/S1071581996901044 Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective (Chan & Sengupta, 2010) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1509/jmkr.47.1.122 On 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_v1 Steve Rathje's website https://stevenrathje.com/ Steve Psychology on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@stevepsychology

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-everythinghttps://maggieappleton.com/planning-agentsMai 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

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-transformation

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 Design01:11 Upcoming Speaking Engagements04:44 Mobbin's MCP Release11:34 Perplexity and NVIDIA's Local AI Agent23:54 The Concept of Design Ledgers Show Notes https://mobbin.com/mcphttps://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/perplexity-partners-with-nvidia-to-launch-portable-computer-a-fully-local-ai-agent-with-zero-token-costshttps://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/

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 https://medium.com/@maudbenaddi/bias-in-llms-or-how-to-design-for-everyone-with-tools-built-for-someone-01b8e38bd17b Target Strengthens AI and UX Capabilities to Power Its Next Chapter of Growth https://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2026/08/chandhu-nair-purvi-shah EasyCircuit https://easycircuit.app/ Dr. Liz Gerber’s LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elizgerber_ai-builds-cardboard-cutouts-of-people-not-share-7440452615232024576-aS5k/

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-software AI and the Mangrove Problem https://andybudd.com/archives/2025/09/ai-and-the-mangrove-problem The 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/4znTIPt Pattern Recognition book https://amzn.to/4znk9F5

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-substacks

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 Full report / download Report microsite Andrew Hogan on LinkedIn Andrew Hogan, "AI Fluency Isn't the Finish Line" Shane Johnston on LinkedIn

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=web LLM Counter-Defaults by Nadia Piet / AIxDESIGN https://counterdefaults.aixdesign.co/ Thinking in Systems book https://amzn.to/4wuNA6o How 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-f4af4b92155f Charming Robot https://charmingrobot.com Story in a Bottle podcast https://storyinabottle.charmingrobot.com/ The Barstool MBA (Audible) https://amzn.to/4pGRZ3q Fool's Gold, NYC https://www.foolsgoldnyc.com/ MHCI Capstone sponsorship https://hcii.cmu.edu/academics/mhci/capstone

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/

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-fry

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-problemMC Dean, "Who Sets the Quality Bar?": https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/who-sets-the-quality-barEmily Campbell, "Layers of AI Experience": https://emilycampbell.co/writing/layers-of-ai-experiencePerplexity, "Self-Improving Memory for Agents" (Brain): https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/self-improving-memory-for-agentsDave Song, "Control over Context" — user-led memory management concepts: https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/control-over-context-44d975e92efcDan's upcoming novel, The Restoration (D.S. Duffy): https://dsduffy.com/