Two Carnegie Mellon faculty members explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping design. Each week, the show breaks down recent AI developments, examines topics that matter to designers, and speaks with guests working at the intersection of AI and design. The hosts share their own views, which are not presented as those of Carnegie Mellon or the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
Episodes
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 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,
Illegible 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 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
Structured 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 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
OpenAI'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, 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
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 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 a serious AI product look like? https://blog.glyph.im/2026/09/serious-ai-product.htmlJeremy BelcherRobot Heart - www.robotheart.studioLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremybelcher
AI 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 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
Google 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 agents.Show Noteshttps://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
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 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.
Mobbin 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 up.Chapters00:00 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 LedgersShow N
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 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
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 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.
Summer 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 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-figm
Deep 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 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
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 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
Bye 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 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
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 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
Claude 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 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
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 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
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" 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 episo
Copilot 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 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
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 Memoryhttps://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memoryFraude Designhttps://fraude.design/Nik's Interview with CEO of Quilter, Sergiy Nesterenkohttps://www.linkedin
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 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 | Figma
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, 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
Cognitive 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 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,"
Agent 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 towards AI experience design focused on constraints, not prompts. Chapters00:00 Your Next User is an Agent12:23 Rethinking the Shape of Design Teams in AI World17:03 The Impact of AI Efficiency on
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 could be.LINKSMC Dean on Substackhttps://marieclairedean.substack.com/MC Dean on Githubhttps://github.com/owl-listenerSurely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman bookhttps://amzn.to/4sYGQek
Claude 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 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
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 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 organi
Claude Computer Use, Product Intuition, Author Chris Noessel ("Designing Assistant Technology")
Dan and Nik talk about Anthropic's latest announcement about computer use and its impact on how designers design screens. Then they discuss the article "AI didn't kill product intuition. It exposed who never had it." Author Chris Noessel stops by to talk about his new book Designing Assistant Technology and the challenges and considerations in designing AI to assist users. The conversation touches
Google Stitch, 2026 Design in Tech Report, Downloadable Design Skills
Dan and Nik offer opinions on Google Stitch, a new design tool that just dropped from Google Labs. They also dig deep into John Maeda's 2026 Design in Tech report, debating his key insights for designers in the evolving landscape of AI and design. Lastly, a discussion on the codification, sharing and future of downloadable design skills.Google Stitch: https://stitch.withgoogle.com/Design in Tech
AI Image Editors, Institutional v Individual AI, Author Louise MacFadyen ("Designing AI Interfaces")
Nik and Dan talk about new AI image editing tools from Canva and Adobe and the value of baking AI right into existing tools. The conversation switches to a provocative new essay by George Sivulka on the importance of Institutional AI and not just Individual AI, which can be chaotic if it's not coordinated.https://x.com/gsivulka/status/2031797989908627849Lastly, Dan interviews Louise Macfadyn, auth
Very Special Hot Takes Episode: Product Sense, AI Brain Fry, Real Time UI and much much more
There was just too many interesting stories this week, so Nik and Dan do a Very Special Hot Takes episode with a wide-ranging conversation that covers 14 topics, including the importance of product sense, open source tools, the cultivation of design judgment, the urgency of AI regulation, the future of AI images, the impact of AI on design jobs, real-time UI, writing specs for AI agents, and break
Jenny Wen's Three Types of AI Designers, Designers Should Be Crushing It, Managing AI Pressure
Dan and Nik delve into the evolving role of designers in the age of AI, emphasizing the need for adaptability, control of your own process, and how vision and judgement are design's superpowers. This episode explores the impact of AI on the design process, the importance of maintaining focus on the work, and the challenges of keeping up with the rapid pace of change in the industry.
Code and Canvas, Computer Use Agents, The Mythical Agent-Month, Will "Taste" Save Designers?
Nik and Dan talk about another announcement from Figma and Anthropic and the impact on the future of design tools. They examine a new research paper from Apple and the HCII on how to best design computer use agents, and talk about Wes McKinney's article The Mythical Agent-Month. They end with discussing the role of taste in an AI world and if it is the skill designers should be focusing on.
State of The Designer 2026, User Control of AI, Waiting is the New Interruption, AI Intensifies Work
Dan and Nik delve into the Figma's 2026 State of the Designer Report, people feeling like AI is being shoved at them, the challenges related to AI's impact on flow and attention, and the Harvard Business Report's implications of AI on job satisfaction and work intensification.
OpenAI's Frontier, The Return of The Intuitive Designer, Special Guest: Figma's Shane Johnson
Dan and Nik chat about OpenAI's new Frontier platform and what it might mean for designers and even their career paths. We then discuss James Harrison's essay "The Return of The Intuitive Designer." Then Dan interviews Shane Johnson, Principal User Researcher at Figma, on the role that user research has in this AI world.
Figma MCP, UX vs MX, OpenClaw, Creativity Research, and User Research in 2026
Nik and Dan dive deep into Figma MCP and the need for a dual strategy for experience design, that considers both human and AI website visitors. Of course Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw came up. Some research on creativity, and finally the role of user researchers in the AI world.
Google AI Studio Design Mode, AI at Davos, Claude's Constitution, and Software Too Cheap to Meter
Dan and Nik discuss the rumor of Google's AI Studio getting a design mode, Anthropic and DeepMind CEOs at Davos talking about the future of AI, Anthropic's Constitution for Claude, and the concept of software too cheap to meter.
Impeccable, AI as Entertainment, The Four Horsemen of the AIpocalypse
Nik and Dan discuss Impeccable: a set of skills for AI agents to improve the "AI House Style" designs that AIs are churning out. Then, talking about a new research paper that suggests AI's greatest potential is as entertainment and cultural production. Lastly, we review Dan's article that categorizes four possible futures for AI, including AI disappearing into existing apps, specialized AI feature
Microsoft Copilot Checkout, Google A2UI, Razer Ava, 2026 Predictions
On this week's episode, Nik and Dan discussed:Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout, a new feature that lets US shoppers complete purchases directly inside Copilot without ever leaving the chat window.Google's A2UI, an open-source specification that allows AI agents to generate user interfaces on the fly.And straight from CES, a holographic AI desk companion from Razer.Plus: our AI and Design Predictions f
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