AI is opening the door to a new era of design—but most teams are still focused on making their existing work faster rather than reimagining what’s possible. Lou talks with Josh Clark and Veronica Kindred about their new book, Sentient Design, and what it takes to design truly intelligent interfaces.
They introduce the idea of “practical magic”—starting with bold, even impossible wishes and then working backward to create real, deliverable experiences. Rather than defaulting to chatbots and efficiency gains, they argue that AI enables entirely new interaction models, from adaptive interfaces to agents that collaborate directly within products.
The conversation also explores how design systems and past UX practices lay the groundwork for this shift, while designers themselves must unlearn habits that limit creativity. Through their “sentient design sprint” and “minimum magical product” framework, Josh and Veronica offer a structured way to move from imagination to implementation.
At its core, this episode is a call for designers to reclaim their role as inventors—embracing AI not just as a tool, but as a new design material for creating more responsive, dynamic, and human-centered experiences.
This Q&A has been drawn from the podcast episode.
A: Sentient design is about creating interfaces that can respond, adapt, and participate in the user experience in real time. It doesn’t mean consciousness—it means systems with awareness and agency that can interpret user intent and adjust accordingly. Think of it as a shift from static interfaces to intelligent, adaptive ones. Instead of fixed layouts, you’re designing systems that can make decisions with the user, not just for them.
A: AI introduces a completely new design material. For the first time, interfaces can understand intent—not just inputs. That changes everything about how we design interactions. It’s also the first major interaction shift since mobile. For the past decade, design innovation has focused on tools and process. Now we’re back to reinventing the product itself.
A: Absolutely. AI lowers the barrier to entry because the interface is often language-based. Product managers, developers, and others can actively participate in design. In fact, the best results come from cross-functional teams. AI enables everyone to contribute in the same space, which makes collaboration more powerful.
A: Many established best practices don’t fully apply anymore. Designers need to let go of rigid patterns and be open to new interaction models. The biggest shift is moving away from immediate solutioning. Instead of jumping to familiar UI patterns, start with outcomes and possibilities.
A: Look beyond tools. Start thinking about new product possibilities enabled by AI, and embrace a beginner’s mindset. This is a new medium—success will come from curiosity, experimentation, and collaboration across disciplines.
Josh Clark is principal of Big Medium, a digital agency that helps complex organizations design for what’s next. Josh has over 30 years of experience in emerging technology, user experience, and design innovation. His projects include future-friendly interfaces for AI, connected devices, and websites for many of the world’s biggest companies. He is co-author with Veronika Kindred of the book Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI (Rosenfeld Media, 2026).
Josh speaks around the world about what’s next for digital interfaces. He has keynoted hundreds of events in over 25 countries, and has offered countless more private workshops and executive sessions. Josh is also author of several other books, including Designing for Touch (A Book Apart) and Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps (O’Reilly). Read more »
Veronika Kindred is designer and researcher at Big Medium, where she defines and solves design problems alongside some of the world’s biggest companies. She travels internationally to lead Sentient Design workshops and speak to teams at startups and Fortune 100 companies alike. She is co-author with Josh Clark of the book Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI (Rosenfeld Media, 2026). Sentient Design describes the practice of creating digital experiences that crackle with awareness and agency, adapting to your users in the moment. These are intelligent interfaces: dashboards that design themselves, apps that manifest on demand, agents that just get it done, and much more.
Veronika holds degrees from New York University (Politics and Data Science) and the Fashion Institute of Technology (Photography). Her photographs have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine and UNWomen.org. Her research has ranged from AI’s effect on user experience to mobile technology’s impact on African political engagement to the nuances of congressional climate hearings. Read more »
0:13 – Meet Josh and Veronika and learn about their new Rosenfeld Media book
3:14 – Harnessing magical thinking with AI
9:19 – Moving beyond process, speed, and efficiency
13:11 – How designers can transition from tooling to inventing
16:53 – Exciting places the magic could take us
23:40 – 5 reasons to use the Rosenverse
25:52 – The Sentient Design Sprint
30:08 – The Sentient Triangle
33:36 – Is this applicable to non-traditional designers? Or what designers need to unlearn?
39:56 – Josh and Veronica’s gifts for listeners
Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI by Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred
Designing with AI 2026 – June 9, 2026
Enchanted Objects: Innovation, Design, and the Future of Technology by David Rose
Are you ready to master one of business’s most rewarding roles?
Julia Barham, product management extraordinaire, has the book for you.
The Product Management Playbook: Create, Ship, and Optimize Winning Products is your guide to becoming the product manager (PM) you’ve always wanted to be. And it’s officially on pre-order for 15% off list price.
Product management is not a one-size-fits-all career.
In fact, if you ask a dozen PMs how they would describe their job, you’ll likely get a d0zen different answers, from ‘orchestrator’ to ‘team quarterback.’ Yet, there is one thing that rings true for product managers: they act as a connective tissue behind the scenes of our favorite products.
Current or aspiring product managers, product leaders, digital professionals or career changers who are considering product management…this book is especially for you.
Many product managers haven’t gotten through any specialized training. If you’re anything like Julia Barham, you were thrown into (or dove headfirst into) the deep end! Figuring things out by trial and error has its perks, but what about those looking for inspiration, or just starting out in their product management careers?
Julia Barham has written the guide for product managers that she wishes she had when starting this career path.
If you’re on a mission keep customers happy and businesses healthy, then join Julia as she guides you through high-impact problem-solving frameworks and methods that every PM needs.
If product management itself isn’t easily captured in one title, how can one book capture everything you need to know? The secret is this: Julia Barham uses her incredibly varied background to showcase frameworks and plans that account for the wide breadth of customers and businesses that PMs interact with.
Take it from John Cutler, writer and product management extraordinaire who wrote the foreword to The Product Management Playbook:
“[Julia] has led products at a subscription media company, built experimentation culture at a major bank, launched a digital-first insurance model from scratch, and scaled acquisition portfolios serving millions of customers. That range matters. It’s the reason the advice in this book holds up, even when your context doesn’t match the Silicon Valley default.”
The Product Management Playbook gets down to the goal of product management: creating, shipping, and optimizing winning products.
Julia Barham is a product executive, patented inventor, and veteran of the full product journey—from zero-to-one launches to scaling market-leading solutions across Fortune 100 companies. She has built inaugural product teams, led B2C and B2B products, and run digital experimentation engines that generated multimillion-dollar revenue gains.
Julia’s work has earned top-tier recognition for innovation and design, but her true passion is helping teams cut through corporate complexity and bridge the gap between ambitious strategy and daily execution—the space where most business leaders and product teams struggle. Read more »
A: This book is meant to give you something you can use on Monday morning when a new problem hits your inbox. It keeps in mind the reality for everyday practitioners: managing a portfolio of features in different stages of maturity, trying to balance discovery and delivery simultaneously, working without durable design and data partners, and dealing with needy stakeholders.
A: Yes! This book uses the term PM as shorthand, but it’s written for anyone building technology-enabled solutions to meet customer needs and business goals. If that’s the work you do, this book is for you.
A: Yes, AI is reshaping and accelerating parts of the product development life cycle in powerful ways, but even AI product teams require human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
But if you’re working directly with artificial intelligence, there is an AI Product Manager’s Starter Kit included in this book!
The Product Management Playbook: Create, Ship, and Optimize Winning Products will be released on July 14, 2026. Until then, it is available for pre-order at 15% off the list price.
Last week in the Rosenverse, we hosted a session in which Dolly Parikh as a part of our Exit Interviews series. In it, Dolly discussed her transition from UX and product to social and environmental causes, and how others can make a similar change in their careers.
Log into the Rosenverse to watch the recording.
See what you missed below.
May 21: Dolly Parikh reflects on her transition from a long career in UX, Product, and Information Architecture to her current work as an Impact Strategist and Social Entrepreneur advancing sustainable development. She shares how Human?Centered Design, Systems Thinking, and Innovation Practices became the foundation for her shift into Ecosystem Conservation at The Nature Conservancy and her mentorship of Global Social Ventures. This session offers UX practitioners an inside look at how design skills translate beyond the tech industry and how they can be leveraged to drive regenerative, systems?level impact in the social and environmental sector. Watch the recording »
As a social entrepreneur, Dolly Parikh focuses on impact, strategy, and innovation capacity building for sustainable development. At The Nature Conservancy, whose mission is to protect land, water, and ocean on which life thrives, she leverages Human-Centered Design, Systems Thinking, and Innovation methodologies to drive impact in ecosystem conservation. After spending a couple of decades as a Product, UX, and Information Architect in B2B and B2C Technology Companies, Dolly expanded her design and problem-solving practice for social good. Read more »
This Q&A was drawn from the Rosenverse Live session.
A: UX is fundamentally about understanding people, clarifying complex problems, and designing better experiences. Those same skills are powerful in the impact sector because they help teams communicate clearly, prioritize effectively, and build services that are easier for people to use.
A: The biggest leverage comes from communication and storytelling. When you can frame a problem well and show why it matters, you make it easier for others to align around the solution and move the work forward.
A: AI can help close resource gaps when teams are underfunded, understaffed, or stretched thin. Used thoughtfully, it can support faster operations, better knowledge access, and more scalable service delivery.
A: Research, facilitation, synthesis, and design strategy are useful almost anywhere people need better decisions and better services. Those skills travel well because they are built around understanding behavior and improving human systems.
A: AI should support people, not replace judgment. In the impact sector, it can help stretch limited resources, but it works best when teams stay focused on equity, context, and the actual needs of communities.
Catch up on last week’s recordings, and mark your calendar for upcoming events.
See you in the Rosenverse!
Get acquainted with AI or get left behind.
That seems to be the consensus these days across all industries. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to boom, we want to explore how the technology is impacting the user experience (UX) space. According to Maze’s 2026 Future of User Research report, two out of three researchers are using AI at some point in their process. With such a significant number, it’s crucial to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest in artificial intelligence.
But how can researchers keep up when everything seems to be moving at the speed of light?
Have no fear; we’ve compiled some of the top resources available to you in the Rosenverse to help keep up with AI trends in user research. So now you don’t have to worry about getting left behind. View all the resources in this post here.
Since the first whispers of ChatGPT came onto the scene, we at Rosenfeld have kept an ear to the ground for how artificial intelligence has been reshaping the research experience.
In 2023, we hosted a panel moderated by Dr. Jamika D. Burge, How UX researchers can partner with (and not be replaced by) AI, in which panelists spoke to their own lived experiences and expanded on the most crucial actions researchers could take at this turning point in UX. Alexandra Jayeun Lee of Microsoft said that “learning prompt engineering will make us better researchers in the same way coding helped designers.”
Since the beginnings of the AI boom, companies everywhere have been seeking out ways to incorporate the newest technology—much to the behest of some employees. How can we implement AI into our work without it replacing us? Will AI take away jobs like predicted when it first exploded? (Spoiler: Not really). When it comes to user research, innovation involves utilizing AI in a way that is a research partner, rather than a shortcut or a replacement.
“Learning prompt engineering will make us better researchers in the same way coding helped designers.”
– Alexandra Jayeun Lee
When used as a tool, AI has the potential to do lots of heavy lifting and ease burdens of things such as transcription, pattern mapping, data organization, and more. There are many tools out there that additionally boast of insight generation, but it’s important to pair these tools with a human perspective, keeping an eye out for confirmation bias and feedback loops in AI-generated information.
By crafting the right prompts and using AI to its strengths, user researchers can develop a companion in their research, and a helpful, trainable one at that.
Watch: How UX researchers can partner with (and not be replaced by) AI
While artificial intelligence can make researchers’ lives easier, it has its limitations.
In Research That Scales, author Kate Towsey says to “Treat AI as you would any other tool: question where it will be best used, and how it will impact the culture, results, and value of research.”
Jake Burghardt, author of Stop Wasting Research, has dedicated a whole book to building research repositories and limiting research waste—even without the help of AI. Yet Jake advocates for appropriate AI use, citing the time it can save, as well as the support it can offer. At the same time, he cautions that there is no “push-button” technology that will magically solve the problem of research waste.
“When appropriate, adding AI-based features to research tooling can valuably support operations…AI in defined use cases can be a complement for researchers’ smarts, sometimes saving extensive manual efforts.”
– Jake Burghardt
This is a situation in which understanding AI’s benefits versus its limitations is critical. Artificial intelligence can be of great use to the user research process. In fact, User Interviews’ 2024 AI in UX Research report cites that 48% of surveyed participants cite AI’s speed as a benefit. And in Maze’s 2026 User Research Report, 63% cite improved turnaround time as a benefit. The evidence here is clear: AI can be a timesaver for UX research. But it’s not the answer to everything.
Build Better Products author Laura Klein presented her talk, Human vs. machine: Testing AI’s ability to synthesize and analyze research at Advancing Research 2026 this past March, as a way to demonstrate this exact conundrum. Here’s a peek at some of her findings:
Read: Research That Scales by Kate Towsey
Read: Stop Wasting Research by Jake Burghardt
Watch: Human vs. machine: Testing AI’s ability to synthesize and analyze research
What better way to keep up with trends than by hearing from the researchers on the front lines of this innovation?
There are many resources out there for user experience professionals, but the Rosenverse combines thousands of hours of conference and community videoconferences with years of podcast episodes, dozens of high-quality books, and a UX-specific chatbot. We may be biased, but we seriously cannot recommend it enough. Here’s our two favorite ways to stay up-to-date on AI trends:
Did you know that Rosenfeld Media hosts free virtual events—around 100 per year?
We like the keep our finger on the pulse of all things UX, and right now that includes frank discussions about AI. Here are some of our recent Rosenverse Live sessions about artificial intelligence:
The Designing with AI conference is entering its third year as a standout in the UX space. Since 2023, Rosenfeld Media has been painstakingly crafting the annual event with the most poignant and relevant case studies and talks about AI.
Who better to learn about AI from than the designers and researchers on the ground using it?
If you’re Rosenverse Gold member, you can watch all past Designing with AI conference sessions. But you don’t have to miss out: Designing with AI 2026 is in just a few short weeks! Register now for #DwAI2026.
Watch: The Handoff is Dead: Design-Led Engineering with AI Agents
Watch: When AI Agents Meet Reality. Service Design Lessons from a Pilot
Watch: Improving Democratized Research with CustomGPTs and Gems
Attend: Designing with AI 2026
How are you staying up to date with the latest AI trends in user research? Do you believe AI is the next evolution of research, or do you have a more cynical take? Let us know!
You can access all resources listed in this post here »
AI may be built on language—but according to Paul Ford, we’re still struggling to find the right words to describe what it’s actually doing to our work and thinking. Lou and Paul explore how language shapes our ability to understand—and responsibly use—AI.
Drawing on his dual background in programming and writing, Paul shares a set of evolving “rules” for working with AI: don’t let it replace your thinking, be wary of its tendency to flatter, and build systems that help you verify and structure its output rather than blindly trusting it. He explains how he uses AI to accelerate prototyping and research while still preserving human judgment, creativity, and accountability.
The discussion also zooms out to the broader cultural moment. From skeptical college students to industry hype cycles, Paul argues that people are more discerning than we often assume—and that AI’s impact will play out in diverse, deeply human ways.
Paul will be the opening speaker at the upcoming Designing with AI conference, where he’ll expand on these ideas and introduce new language for navigating this rapidly evolving space.
His takeaway? We’re not at the end of history—we’re in a messy, fascinating transition, and the best we can do is stay curious, thoughtful, and engaged.
This Q&A is drawn from the podcast episode.
A: The image I keep coming back to is the difference between jagged and smooth. AI output tends toward smooth — it’s confident, fluent, well-structured, and immediately plausible. That smoothness is actually a kind of trap, because the jagged stuff — the weird hesitation, the half-formed idea, the counterintuitive hunch — is often where real thinking lives. Your own roughness isn’t a bug to be edited out. It’s evidence that something is actually happening upstairs.
When you outsource too much of your thinking to AI, you get smooth output but you risk losing the texture of your own mind. The goal isn’t to resist AI — it’s to stay jagged enough that you’re still genuinely contributing, still thinking your own thoughts, rather than just editing what a model handed you.
A: Because the words we use to describe what AI is doing shape whether we can think clearly about it at all. Right now, the available language is mostly borrowed — from science fiction, from corporate marketing, from hype cycles. We say models “hallucinate,” we say they “understand,” we say they’re “thinking.” None of those words are quite right, and using them imprecisely leads to both overconfidence and misplaced fear.
Part of what I want to do — and what I’ll be expanding on at the Designing with AI conference — is develop better, more honest vocabulary for what these systems actually do and don’t do. You can’t navigate something responsibly if you don’t have language that lets you describe it accurately. That’s not a philosophical nicety. It has real consequences for how teams use these tools and what decisions they make.
A: I want to be careful not to oversell these as rules, because I keep revising them — which is part of the point. The first is the most important: don’t let it replace your thinking. Use it to accelerate your thinking, to stress-test your ideas, to cover research ground faster. But the judgment, the synthesis, the thing you’re actually trying to figure out — that has to stay with you. The moment you hand that over, you’ve also handed over the accountability.
The second is to be genuinely wary of the flattery. These systems are natively inclined to tell you that your idea is good. They are almost constitutionally agreeable. If you’re a leader, that is an extremely dangerous quality to expose yourself to — you will hear a lot of “yes, and” when what you actually need is “wait, but.”
The third is to build systems around the output rather than trusting it directly. Verification structures, review layers, prompts that force the model to argue against its own previous answer. You want to narrow the risk before you let it run.
A: When it gets into that weird social relationship where it’s telling you that was a good idea, that’s where my alarm bells go off. The native buttering-up quality of these technologies is genuinely dangerous, because of course you always want to hear it — especially when you’re a boss.
People in positions of authority are already somewhat insulated from honest feedback. Direct reports learn quickly what the boss likes to hear. And now you have a technology that has essentially been trained to be agreeable, to be helpful, to give you what you seem to want. That’s not a neutral tool. It can quietly reinforce your blind spots and confirm your assumptions without you ever noticing it’s happening.
The antidote is to be deliberate about using AI to challenge you, not just assist you. Ask it to find the flaws in your plan. Ask it to steelman the opposing view. Ask it to tell you what you’re probably missing. That takes discipline, but it’s the difference between AI as a thinking partner and AI as an expensive yes-man.
A: The key move for me is front-loading the structure. Before I let a model generate anything significant, I put real effort into defining the constraints — what I’m trying to learn, what format I want, what I already believe, and crucially, what I want to verify independently afterward. You can really narrow your risk when you’re working with this stuff, and then you can let it go and see what it comes up with.
For prototyping, AI is extraordinary. You can go from an idea to something you can actually interact with and react to in a fraction of the time it used to take. That changes the creative and strategic process in ways that are genuinely exciting. But I’m always conscious that a prototype that looks polished isn’t the same as an idea that’s been validated. The speed is real; the judgment still has to come from somewhere else.
For research, I use it to cover ground quickly and surface things I didn’t know to look for — and then I go verify the things that matter. The model is a collaborator, not an oracle.
Paul Ford is a multidisciplinary technology founder, writer, and product leader based in New York with 16+ years of experience building software-driven companies. He co-founded Aboard and Postlight, where he built a design-driven product studio and helped Postlight grow into a 100-person firm before its acquisition by NTT Data in 2022, then returned to focus on new product initiatives and climate-data storytelling. As a prolific writer and editor, he has contributed to WIRED, Harper’s, NPR, The Morning News, and New York Magazine, blending technical rigor with cultural insight. His ventures range from solo projects like Ftrain.com to community experiments like tilde.club, reflecting an enduring passion for hands-on creation and open communities. Read more »
0:11 – Meet Paul
5:30 – Can language keep up with technological change?
12:48 – Paul’s rules for professionals
18:11 – Where is the slippery slope? Paul weighs in.
22:23 – Paul reveals his gift for the audience
23:03 – 5 reasons to use the Rosenverse
25:18 – A story about some NY college students
29:21 – The anger and skepticism toward AI
35:18 – Wrapping up
Do your designs adapt to users in the moment? Are you using artificial intelligence to its full potential in your products?
Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI is the book for you.
In fact, Kirkus Reviews just called it “An essential guide for building responsible and revolutionary AI-mediated user experiences.”
With this book, you’ll learn to create experiences that crackle with awareness and agency, adapting to your users in the moment. Sentient Design is the practice of crafting intelligent interfaces: dashboards that design themselves, apps that manifest on demand, agents that just get it done, and much more. This groundbreaking read by Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred gives designers and product leaders the practical framework and imaginative perspective to deliver extraordinary new products using AI as a design material.
If you’re a…
…This book helps you decide what to make and why it matters, giving you the patterns and process to conjure the next generation of AI-powered products.
Don’t just take our word for it—see what the professionals have to say!
“Josh and Veronika have done something so rare. They’ve named a thing that was already happening, but we didn’t have language for. Sentient Design is a smart, generous exploration of how we’ll engage with AI as humans and as designers. Essential reading for anyone building the next generation of digital experiences.”
—Katja Forbes, CX futurist and author, Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun
“Sentient Design is the ultimate guidebook to a world where the best interface is a thinking one.”
—Golden Krishna, author of The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology
“Sentient Design offers clear vocabulary and concrete examples to help designers better imagine what’s possible with machine intelligence as design material.”
—Randy Hunt, head of design, Notion
AI design is the broader practice of designing products that use artificial intelligence. Sentient design is more specific: it focuses on interfaces that feel context-aware, adaptive, and behaviorally responsive to the user.
It changes how UX teams think about flows, states, feedback, and trust. Instead of designing only what users click, teams also design how systems should respond, explain themselves, and adjust in real time.
Designers need systems thinking, content strategy, interaction design, research skills, and a strong understanding of AI limitations. They also need to design for uncertainty, not just ideal user journeys.
The biggest challenges are unpredictability, transparency, user control, and trust. When interfaces adapt dynamically, designers must make sure the experience still feels understandable and safe.
Last week in the Rosenverse, we hosted a session in which Nathan Shedroff, Hugh Dubberly, and Thomas J. McLeish explored what might replace the design school as we know it, and who gets to define what education means in the future.
Log into the Rosenverse to watch the recording.
See what you missed below.
May 8: Design schools are collapsing—literally. When institutions like California College of the Arts close after more than a century, it’s clear our old model of design education can’t survive economic pressure, tech disruption, or outdated ideas about what “training” should be. So what comes next? Nathan Shedroff, Thomas J. McLeish, and Hugh Dubberly will lead an exploration of what might replace the design school as we know it: apprenticeships, corporate academies, AI mentors, decentralized credentialing—and models no one’s tried (yet). It’s not just about how designers will learn, but who gets to define what education means in the future. Watch the recording »
Nathan Shedroff is the executive director of Seed Vault Ltd, a Singapore-based platform building an independent, trusted bot economy on the blockchain. He manages a cadre of experienced bot enthusiasts and technologists developing new ways to ensure user privacy, shepherd the shift to this new paradigm, create ways for people to profit from their creative work, and save the business sector from its most critical threat ever. He is a design pioneer turned entrepreneur and an international educator, speaker, and consultant. Read more »
Hugh Dubberly was a Creative Director at Apple Computer (1986 – 1994), managing graphic design and corporate identity; he also produced the technology-forecast film “Knowledge Navigator” presaging the Internet and interaction via mobile devices. At Netscape (1995 – 2000), he was Vice President of Design managing groups responsible for the design, engineering, and production of Netscape’s web services. He co-founded Dubberly Design Office (2000), a software, system, and service design consultancy, whose clients have included Amazon, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, J&J, Lilly, Nikon, Samsung, and Visa. Read more »
Thomas J. McLeish is a Lecturer in the Master of Design program at UC Berkeley and at California College of the Arts, where he teaches graduate courses in AI prototyping and emerging design practices. At UC Berkeley, he serves on the Jacobs Institute Executive Committee’s AI working group, shaping how the Institute integrates AI across its design programs. An MIT Media Lab alumnus, he was shaped by Nicholas Negroponte’s vision of responsive, conversational systems and by Gordon Pask’s cybernetic idea that intelligent systems should engage users in dialogue rather than deliver static responses. His reconstruction of Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles—exhibited at the Centre Pompidou and now in the permanent collection at ZKM—extends that lineage into contemporary practice. Read more »
This Q&A was drawn from the Rosenverse Live session.
A: Design education is being pressured by changes in technology, work, and knowledge sharing. As communication tools evolve and AI reshapes how people learn and collaborate, the old classroom model may no longer be enough on its own.
A: Possible replacements include apprenticeships, corporate academies, decentralized credentialing, and hybrid systems that combine making, theory, and mentorship. The larger point is that design education may become more distributed and less tied to a single institution.
A: AI could act as a mentor, a collaborator, and a tool for personalized learning. But it also raises bigger questions about who teaches, who evaluates, and how knowledge gets validated when technology can generate answers quickly.
A: Critical thinking remains essential, but it works best when paired with critical making. In design, thinking and making reinforce one another, so learning should move back and forth in a recursive loop rather than separating theory from practice.
A: That is one of the most important questions. If education moves beyond schools, then employers, communities, platforms, and AI systems may all influence what counts as legitimate learning.
Catch up on last week’s recordings, and mark your calendar for upcoming events.
See you in the Rosenverse!
Designers, how have you been incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into your practice?
Whether you’re embracing the innovative technology with open arms or eyeing it with a healthy dose of skepticism, one thing is certain: the future of design is changing. Fast.
But what does designing with AI look like? And what are the benefits, downsides, implications, and impact of using this tool?
Don’t fret—the Designing with AI conference is here to help.
Designing with AI is a live online conference hosted by longtime UX book publisher and conference host Rosenfeld Media. Across two days, experts and renowned speakers in the user experience and design worlds come together to present case studies, panels, and talks about how they’re incorporating AI into their work, as well as their hopes, fears, and predictions for the future of the industry. Designing with AI 2026 is the third rendition of the event.
The program, crafted by our curation team led by Llewyn Paine, is made up of a unique blend of case studies, panels, and featured talks from over a dozen experts spanning two days.
Our expert speakers hail from companies such as Dalberg Design, JP Morgan Chase, and Cloudflare. For a full speaker list, click here.
Now, let’s explore the talks that we’ve just added to the program!
Tuesday, June 9, 2026 | 1:15pm – 1:45pm PT
Vibe coding can feel empowering for designers, but production code plays by different rules–and designers can’t see the full picture. In this panel, our panel members will unpack the hidden constraints, tradeoffs, and expectations that shape real codebases. Learn what engineers wish designers understood about AI?generated code, and how to collaborate more effectively as design and engineering roles continue to blur. View talk info »
Changying (Z) Zheng leads Product Experience Operations at Cloudflare, a global internet infrastructure and security company. She’s passionate about improving the lives of those she works with daily. Prior to this position, Z led design teams in-house and at design consultancy firms. Z has also a background in EdTech and spent her time teaching and mentoring the next generation of designers.
David Eisner is a Product Design executive with over 25 years of experience bridging the gap between design and engineering. Currently the VP of Product Design and Research at Amwell Healthcare, he pioneered a hands-on AI training program that empowers designers to ship production-ready frontend code. This approach eliminates traditional handoffs and miscommunications while raising the bar for product quality. Previously, David held senior leadership roles at Amazon, Audible, Haven, Plated, and Huge Inc. He is also the founder of CraftAmplify (craftamplify.com), where he actively teaches designers how to use AI to gain independence and creative agency. David holds a B.S. in Interactive Media from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.A. in Media Design from Keio University in Japan. A lifelong builder and explorer, he spends his time off the clock experimenting with emerging tech, navigating the NYC food scene, and planning his next travel adventure.
Elyse Holladay (she/her) is a long-time design systems practitioner and speaker, currently the Staff Design Engineer for Color Health’s Continuum Design System. She was tapped to start the first design system team for Indeed, has taught hundreds of hours of technical training content, and has been invited to speak at well-known industry events such as Clarity, CSSConf Berlin, and Frontend Design Conference. She is also the host of On Theme: Design Systems in Depth. She’s a technical generalist, off-the-charts extrovert, avid reader, and expat Texan with an armadillo tattoo.
Amelia Wattenberger is a developer, designer, and prototyper. She spent almost a decade building data-intensive dashboards, and the last half-decade exploring ways to innovate on how developers work. Currently, she’s supporting companies at Sutter Hill Ventures.
Tuesday, June 9, 2026 | 2:30pm – 3:00pm PT
Create experiences that have the awareness and agency to adapt to users in the moment. Sentient Design is the practice of crafting intelligent interfaces: dashboards that design themselves, apps that manifest on demand, agents that just get it done, and much more.
Learn how AI can elevate design (and designers!) instead of replacing them by grinding out efficiencies. Instead of treating AI as a tool, Sentient Design invites you to use AI as a design material, woven into the interface itself. What entirely new kinds of experiences can we create? What dramatic new value can they deliver?
Intelligent interfaces are the new frontier of experience design. This session delivers a map of the territory, as well as the framework and perspective to deliver these experiences in your own practice. View talk info »
Josh Clark is principal of Big Medium, a digital agency that helps complex organizations design for what’s next. Josh has over 30 years of experience in emerging technology, user experience, and design innovation. His projects include future-friendly interfaces for AI, connected devices, and websites for many of the world’s biggest companies.
Josh is co-author with Veronika Kindred of the book Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI (Rosenfeld Media, 2026). Josh coined the phrase Sentient Design in 2024 to describe the practice of crafting digital experiences with awareness and agency that adapt to your users in the moment.
Veronika Kindred is a designer and researcher at digital agency Big Medium, where she defines and solves design problems alongside some of the world’s biggest companies. She travels internationally to lead Sentient Design workshops and speak to teams at startups and Fortune 100 companies alike.
Veronika is co-author with Josh Clark of the book Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI (Rosenfeld Media, 2026). Sentient Design describes the practice of creating digital experiences that crackle with awareness and agency, adapting to your users in the moment. These are intelligent interfaces: dashboards that design themselves, apps that manifest on demand, agents that just get it done, and much more.
Josh and Veronika’s upcoming book, Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI releases on Tuesday, June 9—the first day of the Designing with AI conference!
Pre-order the book now at 15% off to receive a complimentary ebook with your purchase—delivered straight to your downloads upon release!
The dramatic rise of OpenClaw hints at a future where AI doesn’t just generate text: it owns tasks. In this panel, hear how designers are inventing new ways of working with AI agents, from AI “chiefs of staff” to their very own production crew. Together they’ll speculate what the agent shift signals for designers today, and how we can prepare for a more agentic future. View talk info »
Christian Crumlish is Director of Product at Kind Systems, helping governments develop transformative digital services. Author of Product Management for UX People and curator of the Design in Product conference, he brings a unique perspective from leading product at California’s Office of Digital Innovation and federal 18F. His current Piper Morgan project explores AI-assisted product development, while his government experience—from COVID19.ca.gov to federal digital services—demonstrates product thinking applied to public sector challenges. A Rosenfeld Media Expert and past mentor at Code for America and StartX, Christian bridges traditional product excellence with emerging AI capabilities to shape the future of product practice.
Erika Flowers is a design leader, strategist, and former member of the NASA Digital Service, where she led the agency’s human-centered AI-Readiness Initiative. With over 25 years of experience in product and service design across technology, healthcare, and government, Erika helps organizations bridge the gap between innovation and implementation. Her work focuses on preparing teams, leaders, and systems to adopt emerging technologies responsibly and effectively. Today, she advises organizations on service design, facilitation, and digital transformation, and teaches workshops that empower designers to lead the next wave of AI-driven change.
Benjamin Jackson is a creative technologist who’s obsessed with the future of work. A lifelong software engineer, he built the iOS news reader for the New York Times and served as director of mobile for Vice Media as it launched on cable across iOS, Android, Roku, and Apple TV. After Vice, Ben founded Hear Me Out, where he worked with clients such as Peloton and Atlassian to improve team performance through confidential listening tours.
Want to learn more? The full conference program is available for the Designing with AI 2026 conference!
More of a hands-on learner? We’ve got workshops all about design and AI, offered virtually this June.
Register now to secure your spot at the third annual Designing with AI conference! Trust us; you won’t want to miss it.
Last week in the Rosenverse, we hosted an insightful event with Catt Small about how to develop a product design idea that actually gets shipped.
Log into the Rosenverse to watch the recording.
See what you missed below.
April 30: Many designers create visionary artifacts (i.e. prototypes and decks) that generate excitement in the moment but do not make a meaningful impact on strategic planning. Teams that operate without the direction of a vision often have create roadmaps that feel reactive and fragmented. This results in user experiences that lack cohesion. In this talk, Catt Small shares a practical process for crafting a product vision that drives real decisions. You’ll learn how to identify the right moment for vision work, anchor future-state thinking in user and business realities, efficiently validate directional concepts, and translate long-term direction into roadmap-ready milestones. Let’s create vision artifacts that increase confidence, align teams, and shape strategy! Watch the recording »
This Q&A was drawn from the Rosenverse Live session.
A: A product vision is a strategic illustration of the customer experience you want to create. It matters because it gives teams a shared direction, helps align decisions, and keeps the work connected to both user needs and business goals.
A: The right time is when you need clarity on where the product is going and the team needs help making tradeoffs. Vision work is most useful when it can influence strategy, shape priorities, and create alignment before execution becomes locked in.
A: A vision gets shipped when it is grounded in real constraints, tied to a clear thesis, and translated into milestones that teams can act on. If the vision stays too abstract, it will inspire people but fail to change what gets built.
A: Many visions fail because the visuals are polished, but the underlying idea is weak or incomplete. High-fidelity mockups can create false confidence if they are not backed by a strong narrative, user insight, and a clear business rationale.
A: Product managers should be involved early and actively, because strong vision work needs to be rooted in product strategy and business reality. Their input helps make the vision more credible, more actionable, and easier to align across teams.
Catch up on last week’s recordings, and mark your calendar for upcoming events.
See you in the Rosenverse!
Many of us have been in the User Experience (UX) industry for quite some time—long enough to undergo major career pivots or even exit the field altogether. Change is always fascinating, and we think you’ll really enjoy this collection of Rosenverse Exit Interviews, curated by Uday Gajendar.
If you’ve been asking yourself the questions…What can I do after UX? What career paths are relevant for me as a UX designer? Is there a role out there for me beyond tech?
…Then this playlist is for you.
After years leading design at Google, ServiceNow, and Cisco, Greg Petroff made a bold move—leaving Silicon Valley for Sonoma County and traditional corporate leadership for fractional executive work. Now building two consulting practices while serving as fractional CDO for a fintech startup, Greg embodies what he calls being a “possibilitarian”—seeing opportunity in moments of change. We’ll explore his transition to the emerging world of fractional leadership and how he’s helping organizations navigate our AI-infused moment. Watch the recording »
A: Fractional work gives experienced leaders a way to stay impactful without committing to a single full-time executive seat. It can be a better fit when you want more autonomy, more variety, and a way to help companies that are ready for targeted leadership.
After two decades in Product Design, Cennydd Bowles is stepping away — not out of burnout, but disillusionment. The craft that once sought to elevate human experience now too often serves the false gods of metrics and efficiency, while the industry eagerly embraces approaches that lead to its own commoditization. Cennydd shares why he’s stepping away from the tech industry, what he’s learned about doing design responsibly in a system obsessed with mechanical efficiency, and how his next chapter—studying deception and morality in AI—might still bring us back to what design was meant to be. Watch the recording »
A: It means remembering that design is ultimately about people, not just outputs, metrics, or speed. Ethical design asks whether what we create is helpful, fair, respectful, and aligned with the kind of world we want to build.
After more than a decade of exploring the world as a user experience researcher, Chelsey Glasson found herself at a crossroads: continue in a traditional user research role or venture into something new. She chose the latter. Today Chelsey is in the early stages of a legal career, having just wrapped up her second year of law school. Remembering how scary it initially felt to even consider a career pivot, she’s excited to share why she made a change, some of the humbling and sometimes funny moments along the way, and how the skills she developed in UX continue to set her up for success today. Whether you’re contemplating a transition of your own or just curious about what a non-traditional UX-to-something-else journey can look like, Chelsey’s story offers insight, encouragement, and a bit of validation for wherever you are on your career path. And if you’re considering a change, know you’re not alone. There’s a whole community out here, cheering you on and excited to provide insight and empathy. Watch the recording »
A: Tech often encourages short-term performance cycles and constant calibration, which can make it hard to think about long-term career health. That environment can also intensify pressure around age, stability, and staying competitive.
Mary-Lynne Williams is the founder of Buffalo Firefly, a sound-healing and wellness company operating in Richmond, VA and Brooklyn, NY. Before stepping into this work, she spent over two decades in the tech industry as a product design leader, including roles at Microsoft, Meta, and Zillow, where she shaped complex digital products, led teams, and worked at the intersection of systems thinking, user experience, and human behavior. Her career in tech was successful by every external measure. Yet over time, Mary-Lynne began to recognize a growing disconnect between the work she was doing and the way she wanted to live in her purpose. She creates intentional spaces for rest and has recently opened a second location of her Sound Healing Center in New York City. Her story is not about leaving ambition behind, but about redefining success—trusting discernment, and choosing work that feels sustainable not just intellectually, but physically, emotionally, and spiritually as well. Watch the recording »
A: Trust your intuition and take yourself seriously. If something feels wrong in your body or life, that is information worth listening to, especially when you are considering a big transition.
What happens when the career you worked hard to build no longer fits the life you’re living? In this session, Ashley Sewall shares her decision to step away from senior UX leadership and the questions that followed. She reflects on burnout, identity, ambition, and the often-unspoken pressures of staying in tech—and explores what it looks like to apply design thinking to your own career. This is not a story about quitting, but about redesigning work to better align with values, health, family, and curiosity. Watch the recording »
A: It means treating your next chapter the way a designer would treat a problem: by exploring options, testing ideas, and making intentional choices instead of drifting into the future by default. It’s about building a life that fits your values, not just your résumé.
What do you do when you decide your skills deserve better problems? Sara Conklin spent 20 years doing UX work she was genuinely good at with people she truly liked. And somehow still went home empty most days. The problems felt too small. Worse, some felt like they were pointing in the wrong direction entirely. So she made a bet on herself. She walked away from a senior UX career in corporate tech and spent 18 months building something new from scratch. She journeyed through certifications, new knowledge, trial and error, and eventually a new career in residential electrification. Now, instead of maximizing clicks and driving consumption, she helps people feel more comfortable in their homes while reducing their bills and their climate impact. These days, she sizes HVAC equipment, pulls permits, coordinates subcontractors, and gets fossil fuels out of people’s homes. She also opportunistically uses her UX background to make the whole operation run better. This is a story about reinvention, risk-taking, and landing somewhere you’d never have predicted you’d find meaning. Watch the recording »
A: A tech background helps with product thinking, customer experience, systems design, and building better interfaces around a complicated purchase and installation process. Those skills matter because adoption is not just about the equipment; it’s also about making the whole experience easier to understand and trust.
Change is scary, but it’s easier when you know you’re not alone.
