Ideas and Discoveries
Personal and professional notes about our craft, technique, and the role of design in the world.
sentient design
Say Hello to Sentient Design
Sentient Design is the already-here future of intelligent interfaces and AI-mediated experiences. Discover this framework and philosophy for working with AI as a design material.
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What we’re reading
LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversation
A research paper finds that the reliability of large language models plummet the longer a conversation continues.
Is there a Half-Life for the Success Rates of AI Agents?
Toby Ord finds that an AI agent’s chance of success drops off exponentially the longer a task takes.
AI Has Upended the Search Game
The Wall Street Journal: “Websites in general will evolve to serve primarily as data sources for bots that feed LLMs.”
Values in the Wild
Anthropic researchers studied the “values” of Claude and how they manifest in actual conversation with users.
Welcome To the Era of MEH
Michal Malewicz explores what happens when AI commoditizes core design skills like research, craft, and taste—a race to the bottom. (But there’s an exciting way to move forward.)
Redesigning Design, the Cliff in Front of Us All
Greg Storey exhorts designers to recognize that it’s a new era, like it or not. Don’t look back, he says—reinvent.
Recent Writing
events & workshops
Workshop: Craft AI-Powered Experiences with Sentient Design
Reserve a private workshop to teach your product and design teams to imagine, design, and deliver AI-powered features and products.
icons
Your Sparkles Are Fizzling
Let’s retire the sparkle emoji, purple hues, and rainbow gradients for AI-powered features.
sentient design
Data Whisperers, Pinocchios, and Sentient Design
Podcasts from PDFs! Working code from pen-and-paper sketches! Discover the new AI-powered design patterns that liberate content from frozen formats—and create new experience paradigms.
sentient design
Has the “AI Edge” Become a Dull Blade?
Today’s cutting-edge technology is becoming tomorrow’s ho-hum office tool. And that’s a good thing.
sentient design
The Shape of Sentient Design
Use this diagram to think through and explore AI-mediated experiences in your product design.
sentient design
A.I., Snake Oil, and Miracle-Cure Expectations
Be distrustful when AI is hyped as a cure-all—but don’t assume it’s useless just because it doesn’t live up to outlandish promises.
process
Ship Faster by Building Design Systems Slower
Successful design systems can and should move more slowly than the products they support—but a deliberate pace doesn’t have to create bottlenecks. Josh Clark shows how to reconcile the needs and speeds of product versus design system.
process
Only One Deliverable Matters
Too much design effort goes into artifacts that are not part of the working software. There’s a better way to work.
c25k
How Josh Clark Invented “Couch to 5K” and Helped Millions Start Running
Big Medium’s Josh Clark created the exercise schedule that got the world running. The BBC tells the story.
interview
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: How AI Will Affect UX Design
Adobe profiled and interviewed Big Medium’s Josh Clark about the opportunities and challenges facing UX designers in a world of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
design system
The Most Exciting Design Systems Are Boring
Design systems should solve problems that designers confront over and over again, so that they can turn to more interesting challenges.
sentient design
Systems Smart Enough To Know When They're Not Smart Enough
Google and others offer wrong answers with matter-of-fact authority. How can designers build stronger signals of trust into data-driven interfaces?