A deep dive into Day 2 of Designing with AI 2026
April 15, 2026Designing with AI 2026 is the third iteration of Rosenfeld Media‘s annual Designing with AI conference, and it’s shaping up to be unforgettable!
Dr. Llewyn Paine and the rest of the Designing with AI curation team has been carefully crafting the 2026 program since we wrapped up Designing with AI 2025. The virtual conference, taking place June 9-10, asks the critical questions designers have in 2026, like Where does AI fit into my work? How can I ethically use artificial intelligence? Will AI help or replace me?
This year, we’ve built our conference program around two themes:
- Managing AI-augmented product design work
- The new AI-augmented design process
Let’s focus on day 2 of our two-day conference below.
What does the design process look like when reshaped by AI?
“…UX practitioners are seizing new AI opportunities, while preserving the focus on the human user.”
AI is reshaping the traditional design process. There are new steps to adopt and new skills to learn–all while navigating increasingly blurred boundaries across design, research, product, and engineering. These case studies demonstrate how UX practitioners are seizing new AI opportunities, while preserving the focus on the human user.
Here’s a sneak preview at some of what day 2 of #DwAI2026, June 10, has to offer:
Rehashing the Double Diamond: Collaborating across functions with AI-assisted prototyping
with Allan Lowson, Head of Experience Design and Research, Arity
8:20-8:50am PT: As AI rapidly transforms creative work, designers urgently need new ways to stay in the driver’s seat while collaborating with intelligent tools. This talk introduces a practical, repeatable workflow for designing with AI—anchored in real work from Arity’s internal Cursor adoption initiative. Using Cursor as a case study, we’ll show how AI reshaped our design and product development process by accelerating prototyping and enabling teams to work with greater collaboration and autonomy. Attendees will leave with actionable methods for integrating AI into their own discovery, definition, and delivery workflows. View talk info »
Q: How is AI changing the design process?
A: AI is changing design by making prototyping faster and making collaboration more fluid across functions. That means designers need practical workflows that help them stay in control while working with intelligent tools.
Building trust in an AI-enabled medical device: Designing maternal care for safety and access in LMICs
with Vaidehi Supatkar, Design Researcher, Philips
9:00-9:30am PT: Vaidehi Supatkar is a design researcher working on an imageless AI-enabled obstetric ultrasound system for low-resource settings. The technology is compelling — but the real problem is trust. In healthcare, hallucinations, overconfidence, and misuse can cause real harm. Over 3.5 years, Vaidehi helped lead six formative studies across multiple countries to validate AI outputs, document risk, and design safeguards into the user experience. They actively designed for failure, uncertainty, and escalation — not just success. This case study shows how designers can validate AI results without pretending they’re perfect, work with regulation instead of around it, and build ethical AI systems that fail safely. It’s a practical, human guide to designing with AI responsibly. View talk info »
Q: How do you design for safety in AI healthcare systems?
A: You design for uncertainty, failure, and escalation, not just success. That means building safeguards into the experience and validating outputs in real-world settings.
Conducting pre-research with AI agent personas: Pressure-testing concepts for expert workflows
with Snehal Pendharkar, Vice President Experience Research, JPMorgan Chase & Co
10:10-10:40am PT: Designers in complex domains like finance, healthcare, or government are often asked to design for expert workflows they barely understand, while their subject-matter experts are too busy to join every iteration. This case study shows how niche AI “agent personas” became an always-available, domain-aware first pass on ideas—helping a UX professional in fintech to pressure-test concepts, understand upstream/downstream impacts, and arrive at better prototypes faster. In this work, AI serves explicitly as a pre-research layer, not a substitute for real users, formal research, or usability testing, ensuring that human insight remains at the center of the design process. View talk info »
Q: Why use AI agent personas in research?
A: AI agent personas can act as an always-available first pass on ideas when subject-matter experts are hard to access. They help teams pressure-test concepts earlier in the process.
Moving AI offscreen: Exploring failures, constraints, and recovery in physical game design
with Kritika Sony, UX Designer, PromptPath AI
10:50-11:20am PT: This case study explores what happens when generative AI moves off the screen and into a physical, walk-up-and-play game. Built by a team of four non-engineers, the project used AI to design and prototype everything from game logic to custom 3D-printed and laser-cut controllers. While AI accelerated early exploration, it repeatedly failed in physical space, where sensor noise, variability, and real players exposed its limits. The case study focuses on how designing for failure, constraints, and recovery ultimately mattered more than making the AI smarter, and what this reveals about trust, responsibility, and design judgment when AI becomes part of a real-world interactive system. View talk info »
Q: What happens when AI moves into physical game design?
A: AI becomes much more exposed to real-world limits. Once a system leaves the screen, sensor noise, variability, and human behavior reveal how fragile it can be.
From tools to staff: What the next generation of agents means for the future of design
Speakers TBA
12:35-1:05pm PT: 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 »
Q: What should designers prepare for when working with AI agents?
A: They should prepare for a future where working with AI means delegating more complex work. That will require new ways of thinking about oversight, accountability, and collaboration.
Designing with Power in the Age of AI
with Anil Dash, Principal and Co-Founder, antitech
1:15-1:45pm PT: AI didn’t emerge from nowhere—it’s built on decisions that concentrate power in the hands of a few. As creators, we can’t design responsibly without seeing those systems clearly. In this featured presentation, Anil Dash challenges UX designers and product leaders to confront who benefits from today’s AI landscape—and to imagine new ways of designing that return power, agency, and dignity to the people and communities we serve. View talk info »
Q: Why should UX designers care about power in AI?
A: Because design choices affect agency, dignity, and access. If designers do not examine power, they risk helping reinforce systems that harm the people they are trying to serve.
How can I attend Designing with AI 2026?
Register for a conference ticket to join us live on June 9-10, 2026 and hear all the insights and lessons learned from our featured speakers.
