Designing Assistant Technology
AI That Makes People Smarter
When artificial intelligence is designed poorly, it diminishes people’s skills rather than enhancing them. It can even make users less capable and more dependent on AI. In Designing Assistant Technology, Christopher Noessel provides a framework for how to use AI to assist users, as well as mitigating the risks of de-skilling and overreliance on AI.
Who Should Read This Book
This book was written with four audiences in mind:
- Product owners and technology strategists who want to ensure that the software they offer is doing everything it can for users and their organizations.
- Interaction designers, user experience professionals, educators, and students who will build and inform the direct experiences with these systems.
- Futurists and tech sector pundits who might want to understand that AI is only as dark as they let it become.
- Everyone else because part of the responsibility of being a citizen is building literacy in the major forces at play, what biases those forces have, and what needs to be done to combat negative effects.
Takeaways
You’ll learn to:
- Understand the conceptual difference between an agent and an assistant.
- Better understand your business’s challenges and how AI can help.
- Incorporate the book’s framework into an existing design process.
- De-risk how assistants are introduced to a workflow.
- Learn design patterns to mitigate the risks of assistants.
- Rely on AI assistants just enough, but not too much.
When artificial intelligence is designed poorly, it diminishes people’s skills rather than enhancing them. It can even make users less capable and more dependent on AI. In Designing Assistant Technology, Christopher Noessel provides a framework for how to use AI to assist users, as well as mitigating the risks of de-skilling and overreliance on AI.
Who Should Read This Book
This book was written with four audiences in mind:
- Product owners and technology strategists who want to ensure that the software they offer is doing everything it can for users and their organizations.
- Interaction designers, user experience professionals, educators, and students who will build and inform the direct experiences with these systems.
- Futurists and tech sector pundits who might want to understand that AI is only as dark as they let it become.
- Everyone else because part of the responsibility of being a citizen is building literacy in the major forces at play, what biases those forces have, and what needs to be done to combat negative effects.
Takeaways
You’ll learn to:
- Understand the conceptual difference between an agent and an assistant.
- Better understand your business’s challenges and how AI can help.
- Incorporate the book’s framework into an existing design process.
- De-risk how assistants are introduced to a workflow.
- Learn design patterns to mitigate the risks of assistants.
- Rely on AI assistants just enough, but not too much.
Testimonials
An urgent wake-up call to design assistants that amplify judgment instead of replacing it—an unapologetic blend of pragmatism, optimism, politics, and conscience.
—Josh Clark, Co-author of Sentient Design
A refreshing move away from the concern that AI makes us stupider.
—Elizabeth F. Churchill, PhD. Department Chair and Professor of Human Computer Interaction, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)
Packed with concrete examples, bringing much-needed structure to the frothy discussions of AI.
—B Cavello, Director of Emerging Technologies, The Aspen Institute
A compelling call for ambitious AI designers to lift people up from device-bound dependency to a cognitive ascendancy.
—John V. Willshire, Founder, Smithery
A crucial exploration of the evergreen, core principles of assistance and how to blend those with emerging technology for great societal outcomes.
—Katja Forbes, Author of Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun
“A smart, warmly encouraging look at the future of AI design.”
—Kirkus Review
Table of Contents
Part 1: Let’s Get Crisp on Assistants and Their Risks
Chapter 1: Google Maps as a Bejeweled Crutch
Chapter 2: Will Assistants Doom Us to “Stupidity”?
Chapter 3: What is “Assistant” Tech?
Part 2: The Ways You Can Assist
Chapter 4: The Five Universal Assists
Chapter 5: Perceive
Chapter 6: Know
Chapter 7: Plan
Chapter 8: Perform
Chapter 9: Reflect
Chapter 10: Applying the Universal Assists
Part 3: Mitigating the Risks
Chapter 11: Relying on Assistants Too Much (vs. Relying on Them Just Enough)
Chapter 12: Cognitive Forcing Functions (Horribly Named, Universally Disliked, Incredibly Useful)
Chapter 13: AI Assistance Does Not Work the Same for Everyone
Chapter 14: Assistants in an Era of General AI
Chapter 15: Help AI Help Us
Read the first chapter
This is a sample chapter from Christopher Noessel‘s book Designing Assistant Technology: AI That Makes Us Smarter. 2026, Rosenfeld Media.
Chapter One
Google Maps as a Bejeweled Crutch
I grew up in Houston, Texas. If you’re unfamiliar with the city, one of its defining features is the sheer number of roads. It sits on a gently sloping coastal prairie, to the west of a little pocket of a bay connecting it to the Gulf of Mexico, and other than the coast itself, it has no other natural boundaries. As the city expanded over the decades to its current 100-mile radius, land was readily available, and roads were easy to build. And build they did.
FAQ
These common questions and their short answers are taken from Christopher Noessel’s book Designing Assistant Technology: AI That Makes Us Smarter (2026). You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
- Is this about chatbots?
Lots of ink and phosphorus has been spilled writing about those. It’s a rich field and the coverage is warranted. I even have some favorites to recommend. Erika Hall’s Conversational Design, Cathy Pearl’s Designing Voice User Design, Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe’s Conversation with Things, and Robert Moore and Raphael Arar’s Conversational UX Design come to mind. So, I don’t feel the need to add to the excellent thinking there. I do speak to chatbots throughout the book, most directly in Chapter 4, “The Five Universal Assists,” under “Know,” but I intentionally do not go into any depth about them.
