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Designing Systems That Decide

Josh Clark — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:28:34 UT

“How do we transition our thinking, not for one deeply thoughtful flow or feature, but for a whole system where agents can build things we’ve never seen?”

In his essay The Mental-Model Reset: Designing Systems That Decide, Aaron Sagray explores what it means to design intelligent interfaces at scale. The VP of design at Mural describes his own team’s shift and concludes that more than learning new tactics or design patterns, the next era of design requires a fundamental shift in perspective.

When an agent is composing the output itself, deciding at runtime what an analysis should look like for this user with this data, there is no screen to show. There’s a range of screens. A distribution of screens. … When the interface is assembled at runtime, designers need to shift to outcome-oriented design, defining the goals, constraints, and rules the generation must operate within, rather than the discrete elements themselves. …

Less playwright, more improv director. A playwright writes every line and the actors deliver it verbatim, eight shows a week, identical. An improv director never scripts a line; she designs the scene: who’s on stage, what they know, what the rules of the game are, what’s out of bounds. Then the performance happens, differently, every single night.

This change hurts the brain at first and sometimes offends professional instincts about what control and quality mean for design. Adapting requires unwinding some closely held assumptions about best practices or even what the craft is at its core. Aaron offers a list of 10 instincts to unlearn and proposes their replacements. On the “tired” list: “the screen I ship is the screen the user sees,” “same input, same output,” and “edge cases are rare states we document at the end.”

These are assumptions “held by your best people most firmly, because their careers were built on being right about them,” Aaron writes. “Treat the unlearning with respect or it won’t happen.” He offers an exercise to help limber up a design team around the implications and realities of radically adaptive interfaces.

Aaron draws on the good work of Maggie Appleton, Christopher Noessel, and Jakob Nielsen to explain the arc of this shift. And he shares some kind words about our book Sentient Design, too, calling it the best resource for embracing this transition: “The richest treatment of AI as a design material and radically adaptive interfaces. This is the book I’m recommending for this moment.”

The Mental-Model Reset: Designing Systems That Decide | Aaron Sagray

Boagworld: Designing Beyond the Chatbot

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:56:48 UT

The irrepressible Paul Boag hosted Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred for a podcast adventure about Sentient Design and how to weather generational shifts in craft.

The transition to intelligent interfaces and AI-powered production stokes similar excitement and anxiety for designers as the 1990s rise of the web. While old-timers Josh, Paul, and co-host Marcus Lillington waxed nostalgic about that shift, Gen Z designer Veronika said it’s time to get on with it already. “If you want to be a master designer in 2026,” Veronika said, “there’s absolutely no excuse not to know how to use AI. It has to be a choice, and you can’t make a choice out of ignorance.”

The hour turned to a spirited exploration of what AI is good for and what it’s not. The conversation dug into the heart of Sentient Design: using AI as a design material, moving past the chatbot, and designing responsibly with a technology that is confidently unreliable.

What they got into

The exciting opportunity to make experiences that weren’t possible before, and how that rhymes with the rise of the web and mobile.
The 75-year gravity well around chat: how Alan Turing’s thought experiment somehow became a design brief that intelligent machines must be talking machines.
Why open-ended text boxes put all the work on the user: “Friends, we are not a reading and writing society anymore, if we ever were.”
The four postures of Sentient Design: tools, chat, agents, and copilots.
From user experience to manager experience: AI brain fry, and why delegating to agents looks a lot like learning to be a good manager: establish the mission, review the plan, oversee the work, redirect when necessary, and review the results.
Defensive design for fickle systems: blue dogs, strawberries, and why disclaimers and confidence scores do nothing to earn trust.
Spaghetti scenarios, borrowed from hurricane forecasting: showing adjacent paths and possibilities instead of one false certainty.
LLMs as MCs of the experience — fluent at intent, expert at manner, mediocre at facts, and great at making friends with the systems that actually know the answers.
Lots of examples of Sentient Design patterns like bespoke UI, NPCs, and continuous copilots.
How designers elevate to creative directors, establishing the brief for intelligent interfaces that make design decisions on the fly.
A wake-up call for design systems: escape the “dreary compliance industry” and reconnect design systems to outcomes and complete experiences.
Designers coming back to code with design, product, and development committing work to a common space, compressing handoffs into collaboration.
The future of the design career, and the precarious path and genuine opportunities for junior designers.

Quotable

Josh: “In my 30 years of doing this, this is the most excited I’ve been about the creative opportunity for design.”

Veronika: “People really want to know what to do, so they look to industry leadership, but industry leadership is tired, or doesn’t know what to do either.”

Josh: “If the institutions can get out of the way of the young designers, of people like Veronika… look out.”

Paul: “You said you can’t make a choice out of ignorance. I have made a very good career out of making choices out of complete ignorance of the subject.”

Josh: “You as a designer can’t be there every second for every user. What if you had a capable designer making decisions in the moment, based on the rules of the system and what you’ve asked for?”

Veronika: “The intelligent part is the assembly, but the actual content is not made up at all. [The intelligent interface] is not inventing information; it’s making decisions about what’s important in that moment for that user.”

Josh: “Design systems turned into a dreary compliance industry of ‘you must use these,’ and reduced the effect of design. This is a wake-up call to the design system community: up your game, and connect design systems to outcomes instead of little building blocks.”

Paul: “Humans are still humans. We carry our own limitations, and we don’t change as fast as our technology changes.”

Tune in

Publishers Consider Cutting Off Google

Josh Clark — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:39:02 UT

At the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Bruell reports that big publishers are considering blocking Google’s web crawler. As Google traffic dwindles thanks to AI overviews, publishers see the longtime bargain of indexing for eyeballs falling out of balance. This is the slow-motion arrival of the “Google Zero” scenario that publishers have been preparing for.

A bit at the end caught my eye, though. If the bots are sending fewer people to the sites, perhaps the new business model is to advertise to agents rather than humans.

Meanwhile, Time is helping advertisers get their messages in front of bots, using a sort of Trojan horse approach—creating text-based ads that regular readers never see but that AI crawlers might find. The hope is that Google’s AI Overviews and other chatbots that hoover up editorial content might reference information from that material when responding to user queries. That, in turn, could help brands reach potential customers.

“There are now two audiences,” said Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer. “We’re thinking about, How do we superserve the humans when they do come, and how do we think about the bots as a secondary audience?”

That goes a degree beyond the SEO-for-AI discussion of the last couple of years. It frames agents and robots as a distinct audience, valuable because they’re proxies for the human customers who no longer show up.

The Time approach of slipping bot-only content into web pages is a mild step in that direction, but it presages the likely future of designing entire alternative interfaces for agents who research, buy, and act on behalf of the real customer. Once we start delivering purpose-built interfaces for agents (structured feeds, MCP-style endpoints, agentic commerce protocols), smuggling text into HTML will look like the AI era’s equivalent of white-text keyword stuffing of SEO’s early days.

Today’s existential publishing challenge: treat AI as a whack-a-mole enemy, or adapt the business model to welcome this new kind of customer?

Google Search Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now They’re Thinking of Cutting it Off. | WSJ

The Giant Test Kitchen Where Cooks Battle A.I. Slop

Josh Clark — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 12:47:00 UT

The New York Times explores the test kitchens of Big Medium’s longtime client People Inc. to explain the how and why of creating tons of original recipes to counter an onslaught of AI slop.

With traffic from Google plummeting and the interwebs clogged with synthetic recipes, People Inc is betting that audiences will respond to quality hand-made content within a user experience that’s so good they won’t bother with Google. They’ll come straight to the source.

Mr. Vogel, the chief executive of People Inc., one of the country’s biggest digital and print publishers and the home of brands like Food & Wine, People, Entertainment Weekly, Allrecipes and Southern Living, has already seen chatbots upend search traffic and A.I.-generated slop flood the internet. And he is betting that readers would rather make a recipe created by someone who knows how to handle a chef’s knife than one generated by a robot. …

The Birmingham facility develops some 1,800 new recipes a year and tests an additional 5,300. Downstairs is a prop storage room, bursting with a rainbow of crockery, glassware and table linens in every fabric imaginable. The facility also has a “lab” that has evaluated more than 3,000 products to date, mostly kitchen appliances. …

To encourage readers to keep returning to its websites, People Inc. started MyRecipes, a free product that allows them to save recipes from the publications; it now has more than three million users, Mr. Vogel said.

It’s the same play that proved successful when we designed the company’s People mobile app: a trove of original content in a compelling new presentation. The strategy is working. People Inc. has seen ten straight quarters of digital revenue growth while other publishers and media companies are struggling.

For creative and product people, there’s a lesson that goes beyond publishing: use human smarts and heart for creative content, and use AI to help find it and present it through exceptional experiences. AI doesn’t have to replace content creation; instead, it can elevate great (human) content through newly possible presentation.

The Giant Test Kitchen Where Cooks Battle A.I. Slop | The New York Times

Sinceerly: AI to Mess Up Your Writing

Josh Clark — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 16:47:39 UT

It’s come to this! Sinceerly is a Gmail plugin that provides “AI to undo your AI writing.”

It adds typos, scrubs em-dashes, and plucks out “it’s not this, it’s that” AI tells. Creator Ben Horowitz calls it the “anti-Grammarly,” a tool to make your writing less polished. The app’s CEO mode hilariously trims messages down to a handful of words and adds “sent from iphone” to the end.

Sinceerly’s CEO mode.

I tested Sinceerly by cold emailing 5 Fortune 500 CEOs. 4 CEOs replied. Of those replies, each was under 10 words. 2 replies had typos. One reply called me Larry (my name is Ben).

Sinceerly

Jakob Nielsen: ‘Buy the Book Already’

Josh Clark — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:39:12 UT

Usability legend Jakob Nielsen offers a thorough review of Sentient Design (plus a detailed comic-strip summary!). His conclusion: “Buy the book already.”

Jakob’s review focuses especially on bespoke UI, one of Sentient Design’s 14 experience patterns. There are many types of intelligent interfaces, but bespoke UI is among the most radically adaptive, assembling GUI interfaces on the fly. When handled well, it provides just the right interface for the moment. When handled poorly, it can be confusing and disorienting, a robot fever dream. As Jakob calls out, this is an experience that requires fresh technique and perspective for designers.

The role of the designer transforms from placing pixels to acting as a creative director for a system that designs its own moment-to-moment experiences. …

The vision also sharpens a tension the field has barely begun to address: bespoke, ephemeral interfaces collide with consistency, the property that lets users transfer skills between products (Jakob’s Law) and lets one user help another. And if every screen is generated fresh, you can no longer usability-test “the design,” because that exact design will never exist again. Evaluation must move up a level: we will test the component library, the constraints, and the generation rules rather than individual screens. QA the factory, not every widget it produces. That shift, too, is part of the creative-director role Clark and Kindred describe.

UX Roundup | Jakob Nielsen

Power of Ten: Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:18:14 UT

Is design ready to put aside its fascination with process and operations and return to actual product invention? Big Medium’s Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred joined service design legend Andy Polaine on the Power of Ten podcast for a conversation that roams from Zork to world models, landing on why Sentient Design finally returns design to the business of exploring a new medium.

The design industry has spent the last decade perfecting design at scale as big companies brought design in-house. This was important work but had an unintended consequence: design was reduced to a production function for cranking out conveyor-belt UI, rather than deeper invention.

Veronika and Josh argue that AI lets us create meaningful new experiences that weren’t possible before, if product leaders and designers are willing to seize the opportunity. We’re confronting the first paradigm shift since mobile came along 15 years ago, yet many designers seem more focused on using AI to do the same stuff faster. Josh and Veronika describe a better way.

Listen or read at Power of Ten

What they got into

Why the last 10–15 years of design innovation went almost entirely to design ops and design systems, and why that’s changing now.
Ephemeral experiences that invent the world as you explore it.
The Sentient Triangle and its four postures—tools, chat, agents, and copilots—each defined by the stance the system takes toward the user.
How LLMs suddenly solved the wicked problem of user intent.
Hallucinations as a feature not a bug, and how to design accordingly.
Dolphins, chameleons, and mushrooms: alternate models of intelligence that don’t have to “act human” to be effective.
Practical magic and the minimum magical product.
Why clients who ask for “industry leading” usually mean industry standard (and why risk is overvalued in tech culture).
The spectrum of adaptive interfaces from the casual interface of smart form defaults to radically adaptive experiences invented on the fly.

Quotable

Veronika: “There’s been so much focus on efficiency and process in bringing AI into people’s work, which is not particularly creative. It’s a very engineering-focused view, a very input-and-output scenario. Our book is about the new kinds of experiences people can create, the new kinds of products that are possible.”

Josh: “When we keep trying to fit this technology into a hole that looks like what came before, deterministic systems, we’re frustrated. But [LLMs] were never built to do that.”

Josh: “Systems can now understand anything I say and the meaning behind it. That is computing magic. It’s kind of amazing how quickly we’ve begun to take that for granted, but it’s something we’ve been pursuing for decades, and suddenly it became possible.”

Veronika: “Experiences can take on style and mood and tone and personality without pretending to be human. You would never look at a moody browser and infer friendship.”

Josh: “Intelligent interfaces don’t have to be talking interfaces.”

Veronika: “I don’t necessarily have trust in the people or companies driving these technologies, and so it’s really important to pay close attention and stay engaged. Now is a great opportunity to have a ton of influence over how this technology is implemented in our lives — especially as designers. Getting involved right now will have a lasting impact for a long time in the digital world.”

Josh: “Large organizations are designed to reduce risk and increase predictability, which means reducing innovation.”

Tune in

Listen or read at Power of Ten

Sentient Design Is Here

Josh Clark & Veronika Kindred — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:09:30 UT

Our new book is out today. We wrote it because we needed it. We’re sharing it because we think you might need it, too.

Sentient Design is our answer to what’s next for design (and designers): Embrace AI as a design material for extraordinary new experiences, not just a tool to wring savings or grind out efficiencies.

Sentient Design is the practice of creating intelligent interfaces. These are experiences with the awareness and agency to respond to your users in the moment: dashboards that design themselves, intelligent canvases that bloom with data visualizations, AI that participates in apps like any other user, and so much more. This goes way beyond text-based chat and agents.

You can make things now that weren’t possible before. Designers have been talking about creating adaptive and personalized interfaces for decades. Now you have the technology to do that and more, enhancing traditional experiences and inventing meaningful new ones.

Sentient Design shows you how to do it. You can buy the book today from your favorite bookseller or directly from our publisher, Rosenfeld Media. (Thank you for supporting books and ideas, reader; it means a lot. If you enjoy the book, we hope you’ll share it with your team or post a review.)

Whoa, wait, what?

Remember the first time that AI surprised you with what it could do? That whoa, wait, what feeling? This book sprang from a moment like that. For us, it was when we saw a web app dance … like really dance.

We were tinkering with a weekend project to build a web app that could act out scenes. We told it to be “a graceful ballet dancer,” and a little glowing square began to glide and pirouette across the screen.

We told it to rocket to Mars, and the square turned red and zoomed back and forth across the top of the window. We asked the app to play dozens of different roles—underwater adventurer, inept wizard, cartoon puppy—and it obliged every time. None of this was explicitly coded. We never taught it to dance or drive a submarine. The system took our cues and reshaped its behavior to act out the scenario.

Acting out the scene, “Wizard’s spell gone wildly wrong.”

As daughter and stepdad, we get together for lots of side-quest projects like this. But this one cracked something open. For a little toy, it felt much bigger.

This was something new: an interface that took any request and adapted its entire form in response. The system riffed with us, as users, to create experiences we had neither designed nor anticipated. We called it Sentient Scenes.

Once we saw the possibility, we couldn’t unsee it: intelligent interfaces that adapt themselves to the moment. What if any interface could be this adaptive and aware? What if a website could redesign itself to fit the moment by wiring interface to intent? What if the idea of a website was itself too limiting? What happens when the interface escapes the screen?

Your New Design Material

Discovering this new kind of intelligent interface was both a thrill and a relief. A creeping anxiety about what AI would do to design gave way to real excitement about what designers could do with AI. By weaving intelligence into the interface, we realized AI could elevate design rather than replace it.

We adopted AI as a material, not just a productivity tool. It became part of the very fabric of the interfaces we create. We began working this material into all of our work at Big Medium. In products spanning finance, healthcare, publishing, and more, we’ve made interfaces come to life in ways that have only just become possible.

We’re not the only ones. Intelligent interfaces are emerging everywhere—digital whiteboards that turn sketches into applications, customer service agents that handle routine issues on their own, assistants that generate medical reports from a doctor’s spoken notes. The more we looked, the more we found other forward-looking teams pushing the possibilities.

This exploration has rippled across enterprise and startup alike, but the approach has been haphazard. There has been no map for this new territory, no uniform vocabulary, no framework for choosing what type of intelligent interface to create—or even what those types might be.

So, we started mapping. We identified and named new kinds of intelligent interfaces and organized their design patterns. Along the way, we discovered a broad expanse of experiences that go far beyond chatbot clichés. What began with a study of form led to something deeper: a new design practice.

Sentient Design gives designers and product leaders the knowledge and intuition to create these new experiences. This is not a book about tooling or about replacing design tasks with AI. Nor is it a technical tome about the latest models or prompting tips. Our aim is to give you the perspective and principles to imagine and deliver powerful new products.

Literacy, Map, and Practice

This book gives you literacy in machine intelligence as a design material—what it’s made of, what it’s good at, where it fails. It provides the map, a framework that navigates 14 experience patterns you can use today. And it delivers the practice: how to manage risks, how to move from imagination to implementation, and how roles must evolve.

As a designer, you’ll learn more than just techniques and patterns. You’ll evolve from crafting static interfaces to directing systems that make design decisions in real time. Sentient Design changes your work—and for the better—by rewarding creativity, systems thinking, and collaboration.

But that doesn’t mean you’re starting from scratch; Sentient Design also builds on familiar principles from user experience and product design. Our work stands on the shoulders of giants, and we’re fortunate and grateful for the support of so many who have defined our craft. Big thanks to John Maeda for contributing his generous foreword and to our many advance readers for their valuable feedback. It’s thrilling and terrifying to put a book into the world, so it’s also dizzying (in the best way) that the people we love, fear, and admire lent their names and endorsements.

Challenging and Powerful

We learned Sentient Design the hard way. The work has been fun and frustrating, enlightening and perplexing. AI constantly surprises us with how spectacularly it succeeds or fails. We’ve seen the sparkles fizzle as often as they dazzle.

The approach requires optimism but also acknowledgment that the technology itself is fraught. It threatens deep environmental, social, and creative costs. It raises urgent questions about copyright, labor, and what it means to make things. The cynical deployment of AI extracts efficiencies at human expense.

These threats are real, but they’re not inevitable; many of these harms are driven by business decisions, not inherent aspects of the technology. Modern AI models can be built and used without exploitation. The good and bad of this technology will be determined in part by people like you, the folks who design how AI is used.

The book devotes considerable attention to responsible approaches that anticipate and soften AI’s risks. We hope you embrace those strategies. This consequential work needs all of us, from a range of perspectives.

Two Generations of Design

Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred: We made this for you.

We developed Sentient Design by bringing together two generational views of the craft. Josh has spent 30 years designing for consistency and predictability, the hallmarks of “good UX.” Veronika meanwhile started her career just six months after ChatGPT launched, and she grew up in a world of constantly shifting algorithmic feeds.

Veronika may not have Josh’s experience, but she’s also not burdened by it. While Josh saw Sentient Scenes as breaking the mold, Veronika saw it doing what interfaces should have been doing all along. Neither of us would have built Sentient Scenes alone—or written this book alone, either.

We are also two generations in a more literal sense. Writing this book as a dad-daughter combo makes the stakes higher, more personal. The decisions designers make today will have profound effects on Veronika’s generation and those that follow.

So, we wrote this book not only for you, but for our family and yours. Together we’re shaping the future. Let’s make it dance. You can learn the steps here.

Productive Magic on the Rosenfeld Review

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:03:26 UT

Teleportation! Gliding suitcases! Magic wishes! Big Medium’s Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred chatted with Lou Rosenfeld about how Sentient Design applies “productive magic” to imagine new kinds of intelligent interfaces.

The conversation happened just a few days before the release of Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI, the new book by Josh and Veronika.

Listen in on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Productive magic ≠ magical thinking

Look, magic is tricky business when it comes to new technology. There’s already too much magical thinking and toxic optimism about what tech and AI can accomplish. Adding sparkles and purple gradients won’t make it magic, and neither will wishful thinking.

But! AI enables experiences that weren’t possible before, so traditional assumptions and best practices often limit more than inform. The Sentient Design sprint embraces magic as a deliberate, generative stance to explore essential desires and shake free of old ways of doing things. Productive magic helps designers get in touch with essential outcomes before getting to solutions.

It starts with a magic “what if?” What if I could teleport? Last time we checked, teleportation tech wasn’t quite ready for prime time. That didn’t stop the Uber team from tapping the essential desire for getting there instantly; early ad campaigns touted Uber as “the closest thing to teleportation.” It’s not a bad approximation: tap a button to summon a car whose driver knows the best route to get exactly where you’re going.

An Uber ad in Brooklyn, 2015.

Or consider that nobody thought to put wheels on luggage until 1972. (We landed on the moon before wheels landed on a suitcase!) “The luggage actually glides,” reads the patent for the original rolling suitcase. It didn’t actually glide of course, but that magic wish—a floating suitcase—unlocked an analog solution that had somehow evaded us for centuries: just put wheels on it.

Drawing from the 1972 patent application for the first rolling suitcase.

Science fiction has often informed science fact: computers that fit in your pocket, or a global network of all human knowledge. Over time, capabilities catch up with the dream, and fairy tale becomes feature. More immediately, though, you can work backward from the magic wish to find a pragmatic real-world solution that still fulfills the essential desire.

“Teleportation” yields ride-sharing apps. “Telekinesis” leads to a wheeled suitcase that follows you. Magic rings turn into the Oura smart ring to track biometric data for health insights. The list goes on: we’ve already got magic mirrors, invisible assistants, and books that write themselves.

All of these “magical” services are intelligent interfaces, rendered in today’s technology. Turns out the magic was never in the end product but in spotting new possibilities.

Imaginative perspective is needed more than ever right now. In the podcast, Josh and Veronika talked about how the past decade of design innovations has focused narrowly on tools and process and design systems, on consolidating design practices instead of expanding them. That all happened for good reasons. But now we have the chance to think bigger.

We can make things that weren’t possible before. “We’ve been talking about adaptive interfaces and personalization for decades. Now we’ve got the technology to actually do it in valuable, meaningful ways,” Josh said. “Let’s go! Let’s look up from our tools, and let’s go!"

The conversation

The podcast started with magic and from there kicked into what it all means in practice:

Why the last decade of design innovation was limited to design ops, and why the next decade will finally turn back to product and experience.
The Sentient Design triangle: a framework of 14 AI-powered experience archetypes that go way beyond “slap chat on it.”
What the “sentient” in Sentient Design means: awareness and agency to respond in the moment (“consciousness is above our pay grade”).
How AI flattens the roles of design, product, and development—and why Sentient Design sprints work best with all three in the room.
Why thirty years of best practices need refreshing, and why the beginner’s mind matters more than ever.

Quotable

Veronika: “There’s a fear that AI will push designers out or take over the job. I think it has the opportunity to elevate the role of designer — to make them into creative directors [of these intelligent interfaces], more than somebody responsible for making frames in Figma.”

Josh on Uber as the next best thing to teleportation: “We can’t teleport, but we can have a car instantly show up and know the fastest route to exactly where you’re going. That’s the move: Get in touch with the fundamental desire, then ask what this new technology can actually do.”

Veronika: “It’s really hard to let go of the technology. It’s really hard to let yourself get out of your practical mind and just be wishful. That’s a very hard thing to ask professional and smart people to do.”

Josh: “What if a website or dashboard could design itself? What if an agent isn’t just in some text chat off to the side, but participates as a user, driving its own cursor?”

Josh: “Production is a means to product. How we make things is important, but what we make is frankly the thing that matters most.”

Veronika: “No one really got into design work in order to make things faster.”

Veronika: “Enterprises with really well-established design systems are in a great situation to create intelligent interfaces and radically adaptive surfaces. They already have a set of constrained components to work with.”

Tune in

Design Better AMA: Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred

Josh Clark & Veronika Kindred — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:53:54 UT

Big Medium’s Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred got real in this AMA on the Design Better podcast with Aarron Walter and Eli Woolery: AI fatigue is real. Speed (over quality) is a race to the bottom. Too many are abdicating to AI instead of delegating.

But good news! There’s tons of unexplored territory for designers to claim—and a healthy future for the field. Josh and Veronika spent the hour showing an alternative to the anxiety. Their new book Sentient Design shares how to apply AI as a material that elevates design—instead of a tool that replaces it. “This is the most excited I’ve been in my career about what we can make,” Josh said.

What we got into

Design Better listeners brought questions about AI in regulated industries, the politics of role-flattening teams, how to get beyond chatbots and make the case for Sentient Design’s new experiences. We discuss:

Why “AI innovation” in design has mostly been a race to the bottom — and where the real creative opportunity actually lives.
AI as a design material instead of a tool: weaving intelligence into the interface rather than slapping a chatbot on the side.
How Sentient Design unlocks the adaptive interfaces and personalization we’ve talked about for decades.
The spectrum of Sentient Design, from “casual intelligence” that eases familiar interactions to experiences invented as you explore them.
Defensive design in regulated industries: what’s safe, what’s not, and the patterns that give users confidence in the difference.
How AI flattens the roles of design, product, and development — and the very real politics it stirs up inside big orgs.
Why “just add a chatbot” is the crummy default—and how to make the case for something better.
Knowing when not to use AI.

Quotable

Josh: “We’ve been talking about adaptive interfaces and personalization for decades, and we’ve been kind of lame at it. Now we have a technology that lets us do the stuff we’ve been talking about forever — and instead we’re talking about committing code faster.”

Veronika: “All the innovation has been happening around speed and process. That’s a race to the bottom.”

Josh: “Good, fast, cheap — pick two. Hang on a second: fast and cheap are commodities now. All that’s left is good.”

Veronika: “Part of gaining literacy in these tools is also deciding when _not_ to use them. Sometimes it’s just better to use pen and paper.”

Veronika: “A truly radically adaptive interface is a completely personal experience — the same way every time you talk to Claude, that’s a completely unique experience.”

Tune in

A Great Design Gathering

Josh Clark — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:06:41 UT

Leonardo De La Rocha describes his takeaways from Design Futures Assembly, a remarkable gathering of the tech industry’s top design leaders. It was a small-ish invite list, just 60 of us including Veronika and me. The heads of design were there from companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft AI, Google Search, Adobe, Figma, Expedia, Pinterest, Meta, and on and on.

Jeff Veen brought this group together to consider nothing less than the future of design: how AI is changing the tools, process, and material of our work. The conversations were frank, vulnerable, and curious.

Leonardo does a terrific job of synthesizing the themes that came out of the day, and I recommend that you take a moment to digest his piece. And please forgive me for indulging in this passage about our book Sentient Design, advance copies of which were floating around the room:

There was a book that surfaced in the corners of conversation throughout the day, and which I have ordered enough copies of to embarrass anyone in my immediate professional vicinity. It is called Sentient Design, by Josh Clark [and Veronika Kindred], and the framing it offers (treating AI as a design material rather than as a feature or a tool) is the most useful conceptual move I have seen for this moment. I will not summarize it here, because I would rather you read it. I will say that the design leaders in the room who had already read it carried themselves slightly differently from the design leaders who had not, in a way that was hard to put my finger on at the time and that I think I now understand. They had a vocabulary. The rest of us were borrowing one as we went.

This passage makes my heart sing because it perfectly encapsulates why we wrote the book in the first place: to shift perspective, to inspire action, and to provide shared context and language. To find the book and our ideas doing that work in a room of this caliber was incredibly heartening. Thank you, Leonardo.

A Great Design Gathering | Design Outcomes

Kirkus on Sentient Design: “Get It”

Josh Clark — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:36:05 UT

Kirkus Reviews calls Sentient Design “an essential guide for building responsible and revolutionary AI-mediated user experiences.” Their verdict: “Get it.”

In this insightful manual, Clark and Kindred define sentient design as the practice of creating intelligent interfaces that adapt to real-time user context. …

This work is distinguished from standard tech guides by its measured, ethical stance; Clark and Kindred dedicate space to defensive design, teaching readers ways to manage the often fickle, sycophantic, and hallucinatory nature of AI. The authors offer practical design techniques for handling bias and overconfidence, emphasizing that systems must remain adherent to human interactions and judgment. …

The collaborative voice of the authors infuses a tone of experienced wisdom into the text, effectively blending high-tech subject matter with human-centric techniques and values that will be useful to product leaders and designers.

Kirkus is like the Associated Press of book reviewers: sturdy, reserved, to the point. The warm recommendation means a lot to Veronika and me as authors; we hope it means something to you as potential readers, too.

Sentient Design will be released on June 9, 2026. The book is available for pre-order from Rosenfeld Media (15% preorder discount), Amazon, and all your favorite booksellers.

Sentient Design | Kirkus Reviews

Reimagining the Mouse Pointer for the AI Era

Josh Clark — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:05:26 UT

Google DeepMind shared experimental demos of a “magic pointer,” an AI-enabled cursor that understands the thing(s) you’re pointing at and lets you speak commands or questions about them.

Point at a recipe and ask to add its ingredients to your shopping list.
Hover over a table of stats and ask for a visual chart of the data.
Point at a picture of a place and ask where it is, or how to get there.
Compare this product to that product.

For decades, computers have only tracked where we are pointing. AI can now also understand what the user is pointing at. This transforms pixels into structured entities, such as places, dates, and objects, that users can interact with instantly. A photo of a scribbled note becomes an interactive to-do list; a paused frame in a travel video becomes a booking link for that cool-looking restaurant.

Try the live demos for editing an image or finding a place on a map. There’s still some jank and a bit of delay, but the concept is clear and sound: apply intelligence at the point of interaction, not off to the side or in another app. Google says it’s bringing the feature into the Chrome browser and its new Googlebook OS.

The magic pointer is a tidy distillation of Sentient Design, the practice of creating intelligent interfaces with the awareness and agency to respond to users in the moment. More specifically, this is an example of Sentient Design’s continuous copilot experience pattern, borrowing the interaction of an inline tool. (We’ve got an entire chapter on these experiences in the Sentient Design book.)

Like all continuous copilots, the magic pointer is ambient and deferential, standing at the ready until summoned to support the current task. It folds in the interaction of an inline tool, acting as a super-powered alternative to a contextual menu. It’s the cousin of Android’s “circle to search” feature, a mode that lets you circle anything on the screen to trigger a search for more info.

A few valuable lessons worth calling out for designers exploring this space:

The feature embraces the power of casual fuzzy language; you can just gesture and refer to “this” or “that” and the system can infer context and intent.
The feature is additive, not replacing; it doesn’t change underlying behavior, and you’re not obliged to use it if talking to your computer isn’t your thing.
The “copilot” posture is distinct from the tools, chat, or agents postures, each with its own relationship to the user. Copilots stand by out of sight until there’s an opportunity to help. (Meanwhile, you use tools, talk to chat, and delegate to agents.)
Like most copilots, this feature is an overlay on the existing interaction. It doesn’t require a separate mode or application; it blends into the current interaction paradigm instead of replacing it.

Continuous copilots tend to be most powerful as “always on” system-level integrations, so they’re often the province of platform owners. But these experiences can also be useful as application-wide interactions, too, as Google’s Chrome integration suggests. For product designers, features like the magic pointer can prompt useful questions about whether and how copilot experiences might be meaningful to your users. Ask yourself:

What is the context that only your system’s environment can uniquely gather?
How can that knowledge support the user in the moment?
How might that information inform actions beyond the screen; what adjacent systems or experiences can you reach?

The opportunity with Sentient Design in general is to bring action closer to context and intent. Think beyond chat: what happens when you weave intelligence into the interface itself, making familiar interactions more helpful and aware?

Reimagining the Mouse Pointer for the AI Era | Google DeepMind

Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI

Josh Clark & Veronika Kindred — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:31:46 UT

Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI

What does AI do to software?

Josh Clark — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:45:43 UT

Benedict Evans surveys what AI does to software, and it certainly doesn’t kill it. He covers the familiar shifts: faster development, new AI-powered features, and likely disruption of incumbent software solutions. But then he turns to the most interesting question: what forms will intelligent interfaces take, and how will those forms change both business and customer?

Evans considers how SaaS and mobile both changed what software (and software companies) look like:

One way to think about both of these is that the first step was to do the old thing with a new tool, but the next step was to think of things that were native to the new form. We started by making a Flickr app for mobile, and then we made Instagram, and then we got Snap and TikTok, which embraced the fact that this was a device with a camera, and a touchscreen, and its own compute instead of just a website. Some of the early thinking around AI software is to look at generative interfaces, to think about how dynamic and intelligent the screens could be, and to wonder if you might move away from carefully fixed screens and predefined workflows. No one really knows, but a lot of people will have fun experimenting. …

As I say, in almost every essay, meanwhile, this is all very 2007, or 1997, or very 1982. We know this is huge, we can sort of see some of what’s coming, but we don’t really know how any of this is going to work. And so, there is an enormous amount of white space out there, for people to go out and create things, that have nothing to do with stupid ideas like ‘software is dead’.

Generative interfaces. Dynamic and intelligent screens. A shift away from static workflows.

Amen. That white space is where a new era of intelligent interfaces lives, and it’s exactly the territory that Sentient Design maps out. If you’re one of those people who will “have fun experimenting,” Sentient Design’s framework and design patterns will give you a head start. Get after it.

What Does AI Do to Software? | Benedict Evans