AI and Design

Episodes

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  OpenAI's Intelligent UI, Facebook's Your Algorithm, AI Relationship Quality (ARQ) 22.10.2026 30m

  Fresh off their first live show, Nik and Dan look at three stories about who gets to shape what AI shows us. First up is OpenAI’s Intelligent UI, which lets GPT-6 build small interactive interfaces (charts, forms, buttons, maps) inline in ChatGPT instead of returning a wall of text. They compare it to Claude Artifacts, argue that speed is what makes it usable as a default, and ask what happens when companies like QuickBooks have to hand over a design system for their product to show up inside someone else’s chat window. Is ChatGPT becoming an operating system that generates apps on demand, across the silos our tasks currently live in?Next, Facebook’s “Your Algorithm” lets people steer their Feed and Reels in plain language. Dan draws on his time at Twitter and the promise of Bluesky’s algorithm marketplace; Nik wonders whether more control might raise engagement rather than lower it, and how this data could feed Meta’s Muse agents. Finally, UserTesting has rebranded as Auros and is pivoting toward AI training and evaluation with verified human experts. Its new AI Relationship Quality (ARQ) benchmark measures trust, affinity, and control alongside technical performance, which leads to a frank conversation about why benchmark gains don’t always produce models that are pleasant to work with, and whether ARQ could become the NPS of AI.LINKSOpenAI Wants ChatGPT to Stop Looking Like a Chatbot (Gizmodo)https://gizmodo.com/openai-wants-chatgpt-to-stop-looking-like-a-chatbot-2000823211Facebook Is Giving Users More Control Over Their Algorithm (TechCrunch)https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/13/facebook-is-giving-users-more-control-over-their-algorithm/UserTesting Rebrands as Auros, Aims to Bring Humans into AI Experience (Constellation Research)https://www.constellationr.com/insights/news/usertesting-rebrands-auros-aims-bring-humans-ai-experienceAuros Adds ‘Human Elements’ to AI Evaluation (Daily Research News)https://www.mrweb.com/drno/news40429.htmDan’s debut AI novel The Restoration (2176, Book One)https://link.amazon/B05GcHBe7
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  Live at IxDA Pittsburgh - How to be a designer in 2027 13.10.2026 1h 1m

  This week, Dan and Nik recorded live at the IxDA Pittsburgh meetup. We discuss how we are thinking about being designers in the future, what we are teaching students, and what tools we are using. We take audience questions and hear about how these professional designers are working with AI today.
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  The Fastest Gun in the West, Multiplayer AI, Serious AI Products & Jeremy Belcher 07.10.2026 52m

  The Fastest Gun in the West: https://www.doc.cc/articles/fastest-gunWe're building multiplayer AI. Here's what we've learned so far: https://newsletter.posthog.com/p/were-building-multiplayer-ai-heresWhat would a serious AI product look like? https://blog.glyph.im/2026/09/serious-ai-product.htmlJeremy BelcherRobot Heart - www.robotheart.studioLinkedIn  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremybelcher
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  AI Sychophancy with Steve Rathje 30.09.2026 58m

  This week Dan and Nik sit down with Steve Rathje, a new HCII colleague who runs CMU's Psychology of Technology Lab, to talk about what sycophantic AI does to the people using it. Steve's team randomly assigned people to chat with bots that were flattering, disagreeable, or neutral. People liked the flatterers, shrugged at the neutral ones, and hated the bots that pushed back. For designers, the news is mixed. Validation drives enjoyment, but cherry-picked facts do the persuading, so pairing a little warmth with opposing evidence makes disagreement easier to take (at some cost to its persuasive punch). The bad news: across six studies from three research teams, teaching people about sycophancy through warnings, videos, or quizzes made the chatbot seem less trustworthy but no less persuasive. That puts the little "AI can make mistakes" disclaimer in an unflattering light. We also cover AI dark patterns, whether the right dose of sycophancy depends on the task, and Dan's random idea of a group chat of dueling AI personalities. Plus, Nik explains Jev and the new class of fast, cheap "System One" decision models, and we look at pieces from Microsoft and DoorDash design teams on why AI evals should measure what users experience as well as what models get right.LINKSJev decision model touted as quicker, cheaper LLM alternative (TechTarget)https://www.techtarget.com/it-infrastructure/news/366650696/Jev-decision-model-touted-as-quicker-cheaper-LLM-alternativePutting the user back into AI Evaluation (Microsoft Design)https://microsoft.design/articles/putting-the-user-back-into-ai-evaluation/Building AI Evals: Who Gets to Decide What’s Good? (Doordash Design)https://medium.com/design-doordash/building-ai-evals-who-gets-to-decide-whats-good-39671385f50dSycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence (Rathje et al.)https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vmyek_v1/Observing sycophantic AI validate others reduces its appeal but not its persuasiveness (Ye, Kraut & Rathje)https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25166v1Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we're doing about it (OpenAI)https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/Silicon sycophants: the effects of computers that flatter (Fogg & Nass, 1997)https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581996901044Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective (Chan & Sengupta, 2010)https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1509/jmkr.47.1.122On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4 (Salvi et al., Nature Human Behaviour)https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02194-6@Grok Is This True? LLM-Powered Fact-Checking on Social Media (Renault, Mosleh & Rand)https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/85quw_v1Steve Rathje's websitehttps://stevenrathje.com/Steve Psychology on TikTokhttps://www.tiktok.com/@stevepsychology
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  Google CC, Controlling Image Generators, and Planning with Agents 22.09.2026 31m

  This week we talk about Google's new CC agent for managing family tasks, some techniques to control image generators when you want to constrain certain elements, and a deep article on planning with AI agents.Show Noteshttps://techcrunch.com/2026/09/18/googles-new-cc-is-an-ai-agent-that-helps-families-run-their-households/https://trpevski.com/blog/image-model-decide-everythinghttps://maggieappleton.com/planning-agentsMai Lee Chang, Alicia (Hyun Jin) Lee, Nara Han, Anna Huang, Hugo Simão, Samantha Reig, Abdullah Ubed Mohammad Ali, Rebekah Martinez, Neeta M Khanuja, John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, and Aaron Steinfeld. 2024. Dynamic Agent Affiliation: Who Should the AI Agent Work for in the Older Adult's Care Network? In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1774–1788. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661500ShiftUX workshop: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/workshops/designing-ai-for-humansShiftUX talk: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/program/day-2-turing-machines/Dan's ShiftUX Discount Code: SAFFER-SHIFT26
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  Apple's Siri AI and Audio Intelligence, Project Solaris, Miro Sale, AI Tool Building 16.09.2026 49m

  In this episode, Dan and Nik unpack Apple's big announcements from its latest event, starting with Siri AI: now a dedicated app with personal context indexing, on-screen awareness, and in-app actions, launching in beta with iOS 27 . They dig into the promise and limitations of Apple-only app integration, the EU regulatory lockout, and what daily usage caps signal about Apple's services ambitions. The conversation gets more charged around Audio Intelligence, Apple's new always-on listening features for the Apple Watch, including live audio rewind and Siri Recap summaries of real-world conversations. Dan and Nik wrestle with the surveillance implications, the absence of any on-device indicator, and whether this crosses a line — particularly in two-party consent states like Pennsylvania and California.The back half covers Runway's Project Solaris, a generative UI concept that uses its video model to render fully interactive, pixel-based interfaces with no underlying code. Dan sees echoes of Microsoft's Bob-era skeuomorphism and questions whether it misunderstands fifty years of HCI; Nik finds more to like in its challenge to the sameness of modern app design. They then turn to the surprise sale of Miro to Bending Spoons for $1.36 billion — a 90% haircut from its 2021 peak valuation — and what it means when a profitable, hundred-million-user company gets absorbed into a portfolio known for maintaining but not advancing its acquisitions. The episode closes with a discussion of Benedict Evans' essay "AI, Tools and Transformation," which argues that the Silicon Valley vision of everyone rolling their own SaaS tools misunderstands how most people think about their work. LINKSIntroducing Solarishttps://runway.com/news/research/introducing-solarisBending Spoons to buy collaboration tools maker Miro for $1.36B, 90% less than its 2022 valuation https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/10/bending-spoons-to-buy-collaboration-tools-maker-miro-for-1-36b-90-less-than-its-2022-valuation/AI, Tools and Transformation (Benedict Evans)https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2026/9/3/ai-tools-and-transformation
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  Mobbin MCP, Perplexity and Nvidia Local AI Agent, Design Ledgers 02.09.2026 34m

  This week on AI and design, we highlight the release of Mobbin's MCP, Perplexity and NVIDIA's local AI agent, and the concept of design ledgers. Dan also has some new speaking engagements you can join coming up.Chapters00:00 Introduction to AI and Design01:11 Upcoming Speaking Engagements04:44 Mobbin's MCP Release11:34 Perplexity and NVIDIA's Local AI Agent23:54 The Concept of Design LedgersShow Noteshttps://mobbin.com/mcphttps://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/perplexity-partners-with-nvidia-to-launch-portable-computer-a-fully-local-ai-agent-with-zero-token-costshttps://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/the-ledger-of-designDan's Speaking EngagementsShiftUX workshop: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/workshops/designing-ai-for-humansShiftUX talk: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/program/day-2-turing-machines/Dan's ShiftUX Discount Code: SAFFER-SHIFT26Chicago Camps' Leadership by Design: https://chicagocamps.org/event/leadership-by-design-2026/
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  Figma Make Time Savings, LLM Bias Affects Designers, Target's AI/UX Bid, EasyCircuit 25.08.2026 39m

  Nik and Dan open the fall semester with a look at how their own courses have been rebuilt around AI this year. Nik's third run of AI Augmented Designer now leans hard into professional software development practice. Dan is teaching Designing for AI Products and Services, an Advanced Interaction Design Studio reworked around AI-ready design systems, and a new independent study with Brad Myers on "AI widgets" — what happens when scroll bars, cut-and-paste, and other decades-old microinteractions get smarter.This week’s news: Figma's randomized controlled trial on Figma Make found roughly 20% time savings, but Nik pushes on whether a 52-minute task dropping to 45 minutes actually feels different, or whether the real gain is more iteration cycles. Maud Benaddi's article on bias in LLMs prompts a discussion of how training-data skew shows up in generated personas, AI-assisted copy, and flattened qualitative research summaries; Nik connects it to Liz Gerber's exercise having students generate personas of themselves and watch the class recoil. Target's appointment of its first chief AI officer, Chandhu Nair, alongside Purvi Shah as SVP of UX, gets read as a welcome sign of AI and UX paired around real operational value rather than an AI strategy for its own sake. We close on EasyCircuit, a new app for vibe-coding hardware prototypes — fun, promising, and, as Nik found when a wiring render would have let the blue smoke out, a reminder that basic usability QA still matters.LINKSMeasuring Time Savings From Figma Makehttps://www.figma.com/blog/measuring-time-savings-from-figma-make/Bias in LLMs, or how to design for everyone with tools built for someone — Maud Benaddihttps://medium.com/@maudbenaddi/bias-in-llms-or-how-to-design-for-everyone-with-tools-built-for-someone-01b8e38bd17bTarget Strengthens AI and UX Capabilities to Power Its Next Chapter of Growthhttps://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2026/08/chandhu-nair-purvi-shahEasyCircuithttps://easycircuit.app/Dr. Liz Gerber’s LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elizgerber_ai-builds-cardboard-cutouts-of-people-not-share-7440452615232024576-aS5k/
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  Deep Dive: Andy Budd on the Future of the Design Industry 18.08.2026 49m

  Andy Budd — reformed designer, coach to design leaders, and advisor at VC fund Seedcamp — joins Nik and Dan for a wide-ranging conversation about whether the design industry is about to boom or bust. Andy argues we hit "peak designer" around 2021–22, and that we're now in an era of Schrödinger's design and nobody has opened the box. The bull case is that AI hands designers the means of production. No more petitioning product managers for backlog space or begging engineering for a prototype — designers can spot the debt, fix it, and ship it. The bear case is that everyone else got there first. Product managers can now design, engineers can now do discovery, and design shrivels down to a five-person team babysitting the design system for a 300-person engineering org.We talk about taste of course, but Andy points out that everyone thinks they have taste. He also revisits his poker-versus-chess framing — designers study the board and hate mistakes while their peers just want to play every hand. We end on a genuinely unsettled note about the industry itself. How are your house painting skills?LINKSThe Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/07/bull-and-bear-case-digital-design-age-ai/The Six Levels of Adaptive Softwarehttps://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/06/the-six-levels-of-adaptive-softwareAI and the Mangrove Problemhttps://andybudd.com/archives/2025/09/ai-and-the-mangrove-problemThe Growth Equation bookhttps://www.andybudd.com/book/design + AI Summit — Brighton Dome, 24–25 September 2026https://designplusaisummit.com/Andy Budd's bloghttps://www.andybudd.com/Smilla’s Sense of Snow bookhttps://amzn.to/4znTIPtPattern Recognition bookhttps://amzn.to/4znk9F5
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  Summer 2026 Hot Takes 11.08.2026 39m

  This week, Dan and Nik make some hot takes on news that has come out this summer.Everyone's work is starting to look the same: https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/everyones-work-is-starting-to-lookLLMs reward expertise: https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/A Properties Panel and Annotations, Now in Figma Make: https://www.figma.com/blog/properties-panel-and-annotations-now-in-figma-make/Unpacking ChatGPT Work: the Agent for a Billion Users: https://www.latent.space/p/unpacking-chatgpt-workAgent Behavior (agentbehavior.dev)Measuring the UX of AI: https://measuringu.com/measuring-the-ux-of-ai/Type designers have created a free font that "poisons" AI: https://www.creativebloq.com/design/fonts-typography/type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-aiLinkedIn's new anti-slop button is coming to every platform: https://www.fastcompany.com/91584892/linkedins-new-anti-slop-button-is-coming-to-every-platformHow writers are reacting to Substack’s AI transparency tools: https://on.substack.com/p/how-writers-are-reacting-to-substacks
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  Deep Dive: 2026 Figma AI Report with Figma's Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston 04.08.2026 46m

  Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston of Figma join Dan and Nik to unpack Figma's 2026 AI report. The headline is about AI shifting from individual productivity to team dynamics: 41% now say AI meaningfully changes how their teams work together, up from 7% two years ago. Shane and Andrew deliberately interrogate the "10x everybody" narrative: output is measurably up (lines of code, App Store submissions), but outcomes aren't following, because AI is exposing the communication and alignment seams that were always there. Handoffs can still be an issue. Prototypes are trivial to generate but very hard to dissect. And perhaps unsurprisingly, decision-making turns out to be the real bottleneck.The conversation also covers the blurring of roles (designers shipping fully functional AI-built prototypes jumped from ~10% to 61% in a year; developers doing design work is up sharply) and why developers are now among the loudest voices arguing design matters more. Andrew and Shane reframe role overlap as tax reduction rather than job-stealing — the designer who fixes the visual bug instead of filing the ticket — and make the case for the canvas as shared context, for design systems as the thing "orchestrating relationships" between functions, and for the four shapes of AI adoption (the nascent group has roughly halved to 18%).LINKSFigma's 2026 AI Report — blog post Full report / downloadReport micrositeAndrew Hogan on LinkedIn Andrew Hogan, "AI Fluency Isn't the Finish Line" Shane Johnston on LinkedIn
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  Training Taste, AI Systems Thinking, LLM Counter Defaults, and special guest Dan Maccarone 28.07.2026 55m

  Everyone in design is yelling the same two words right now: taste and judgment. But how do you get them? David Hoang's "Training Design Senses" does, and this episode starts there: how to train the eye, design dexterity, fluency of aesthetics, and rhetoric, with a detour into what copying from masters means when the copying happens through an AI. Then Christine Zhu on systems thinking for agentic products, which asks PMs to stop shipping features and start gardening: decompose for agent experience, define contracts between the parts, build feedback loops that capture correction signals. Our last bit of news is LLM Counter-Defaults from Nadia Piet and AIxDESIGN, a slider-based tool that exposes the settings your LLM shipped with and writes the instructions to override them.Our guest is Dan Maccarone, founder and CEO of Charming Robot, who spent a year rebuilding his studio's entire design process around AI after a project went sideways. He walks us through the experience brief (a PRD with a friendlier name), the whiteboard/review/approved branch structure, and what he calls high-speed mediocrity. He also explains why the prototype's 300,000 lines of code are never shipping anywhere, why documentation matters more now rather than less, and why his team still starts with sketching so they're building from their imagination instead of Claude's.LINKS"Training design senses"https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/training-design-senses”what systems thinking looks like for PM'ing AI products”https://open.substack.com/pub/christinezhu/p/grow-systems-build-features?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webLLM Counter-Defaults by Nadia Piet / AIxDESIGNhttps://counterdefaults.aixdesign.co/Thinking in Systems bookhttps://amzn.to/4wuNA6oHow Buildings Learn bookhttps://amzn.to/4g2Y99V"Never mind the prompts, here's the thinking"https://uxdesign.cc/never-mind-the-prompts-heres-the-thinking-f4af4b92155fCharming Robothttps://charmingrobot.comStory in a Bottle podcasthttps://storyinabottle.charmingrobot.com/The Barstool MBA (Audible)https://amzn.to/4pGRZ3qFool's Gold, NYChttps://www.foolsgoldnyc.com/MHCI Capstone sponsorshiphttps://hcii.cmu.edu/academics/mhci/capstone
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  Bye Bye Purple Gradients: OpenAI's Design Push. Plus special guests: fuguUX 21.07.2026 48m

  Dan and Nik dig into a trio of OpenAI stories: the launch of GPT 5.6 Sol and its jump to the top of the Design Arena leaderboard, notably by suppressing common AI design anti-patterns (goodbye, purple gradients) and combining known templates with customized outputs — followed by Figma Make's OpenAI integration and what it might signal about the shifting model landscape. They also geek out over Codex Micro, OpenAI's slick new macro keyboard designed by Work Louder, which uses RGB-lit keys to let developers monitor and control multiple coding agents without touching a mouse.The episode's guest segment features Jason Hong and Sauvik Das, CMU HCII faculty and co-founders of fuguUX, an AI-powered usability auditing tool. Jason and Sauvik explain how frontier language models can now scale subjective design judgment — evaluating concepts like information scent that were previously impossible to codify — and walk through their two offerings: synthetic user testing (with a diverse cast of twenty AI agents built from Census microdata) and automated heuristic audits. The conversation touches on why B2B software remains so dreadful, the testing pyramid, and the long-term vision of continuously self-improving websites.LINKSDesign Arena https://www.designarena.ai/GPT 5.6 Sol topping the design leaderboardhttps://notes.designarena.ai/how-openais-sol-finally-learned-design-taste/Codex Microhttps://openai.com/supply/co-lab/work-louder/Figma Make + OpenAI integration announcementhttps://www.figma.com/blog/gpt-5-6-is-now-available-in-figma-make/fuguUXhttps://www.fuguux.com/
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  2026 Thus Far: 7 Big Themes 14.07.2026 49m

  Dan and Nik pause at the halfway mark of 2026 to reflect on 25 episodes, 10 guests, and a wild six months in AI and design. Fresh off a week of building apps with Fable — Dan's ambient bird-listening app for AirPods, Nik's long-running multi-agent builds — they revisit the year's biggest themes: the collapse of fidelity and whether wireframes still matter, taste as the designer's (maybe) moat, cognitive surrender and the strange compulsion to keep feeding the machine, canvas versus code as Figma and Claude Design converge, designing for agents when your next user isn't human, the rise of markdown skills (and the ick of scraped design systems), the path for junior designers, and why user research may be the most undervalued discipline of the AI era.LINKSScraped Styles MD repositoryhttps://styles.refero.design/Reverse Centaurs Are the Answer to the AI Paradox https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/Aaron Draplin Takes On a Logo Design Challengehttps://www.linkedin.com/learning/aaron-draplin-takes-on-a-logo-design-challengeHow tech workers are feeling in 2026https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026Why using AI leads to Brain Fryhttps://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry
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  Claude Design 2.0, Quality Bars, Layers of AI Experience, Perplexity Brain 07.07.2026 37m

  Nik and Dan catch up on the news out of Figma Config 2026 — where generative plugins stole the show for Nik (build them with tokens, run them for free) — before digging into Anthropic's big Claude Design 2.0 overhaul, with canvas editing, design-system imports, a two-way round-trip with Claude Code, and a fix for its token-burning problem. From there: MC Dean asks who actually owns the quality bar when anyone can ship, Emily Campbell reimagines the layers of UX for probabilistic AI systems (goblins included), and Perplexity's new Brain points toward self-improving memory for agents. Plus a detour into AI memory, forgetting, and one very confused Claude that thought the show got renamed. Stick around for news on Dan's forthcoming sci-fi novel.Show notes:Anthropic ships Claude Design 2.0 (VentureBeat): https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-ships-major-claude-design-overhaul-with-design-system-imports-code-round-trips-and-a-fix-for-its-token-burning-problemMC Dean, "Who Sets the Quality Bar?": https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/who-sets-the-quality-barEmily Campbell, "Layers of AI Experience": https://emilycampbell.co/writing/layers-of-ai-experiencePerplexity, "Self-Improving Memory for Agents" (Brain): https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/self-improving-memory-for-agentsDave Song, "Control over Context" — user-led memory management concepts: https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/control-over-context-44d975e92efcDan's upcoming novel, The Restoration (D.S. Duffy): https://dsduffy.com/
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  Hot Takes and Big Themes from Config 2026 01.07.2026 54m

  Dan reports live from Figma's Config 2026 conference in San Francisco, talking with seven design leaders — Peter Merholz, Jesse James Garrett, Greg Petroff, Ryan Freitas, Kim Lenox, Alice Quan, and Emily Campbell — about the keynote, major announcements like Code Layers and Weave, and the vibe on the floor. The conversations circle a few big tensions: Figma's push into Adobe's territory (motion, brand, marketing) versus doubling down on AI-to-code workflows where competitors like Claude Design are gaining ground, the shrinking of design teams, and how designers can stay strategic by leaning into craft, taste, and curiosity. Off-stage, the mood was one of cautious adaptation — less panic than last year, more pragmatic grappling with what roles, tools, and identities look like now.
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  Siri AI, A New Interaction-Focused AI Lab, Four Design AI Jobs, Perplexity Computer Research 16.06.2026 30m

  A year ago the consensus was that AI would hurt Apple. Last week at WWDC they showed up with a real Siri AI, the privacy story nobody else can match, and the $$$ hardware to run it. The "AI for the rest of us" play might just work. Dan and Nik dig into what Apple actually shipped, why App Intents matter for designers, and the gut-punch reality that your year-old iPhone won't run it.Also this episode: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is building a design-led AI lab, and nobody can quite figure out what it's selling. Sarah Gibbons maps the four design jobs AI has created so far. And Perplexity's research with Harvard Business School claims agents can cut task time by up to 92% — with enough caveats to fill a show. LINKSSecret AI Lab Newshttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-plans-to-start-a-new-ai-companyThe Four Design Jobs AI Created (So Far)https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-jobs-ai-created/Perplexity/HBS Researchhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07489Thinking Machines Demo Videohttps://youtu.be/A12AVongNN4?si=ODvSCf9IKTzwBiiU
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  Copilot Redesign, Is AI ever Done, Amazon Proteus, Miro's Head of AI Design Mark Boyes-Smith 10.06.2026 1h 3m

  Dan and Nik dig into Microsoft's sweeping redesign of 365 Copilot , transforming the prompt box into a task-aware workspace, leaning into progressive disclosure, and positioning AI as an embedded layer across Word, Excel, and Outlook rather than a bolt-on feature. They also discuss Jeff Gothelf's argument that "done" means something fundamentally different for AI products, where probabilistic outputs require teams to write acceptance criteria as distributions and build failure triage into launch rather than after. Rounding out the news: Amazon's Proteus warehouse robots can now take natural-language direction from human workers, and a Salesforce designer shares how her team is mastering AI tools through peer-to-peer learning, a dynamic that gives Dan flashbacks to the early days of the web.Then Nik sits down with Mark Boyes-Smith, Head of AI Design at Miro, for a deep look at how one of the world's largest collaboration platforms is integrating AI at every layer. Mark walks through Miro's new Sidekicks and Flows features, including voice interaction and custom connectors, and talks candidly about how his distributed design team rapid-prototypes in code, branches and remixes ideas, and builds conviction before shipping. He also shares his thinking on designing for long-running agentic tasks, the coming challenge of multi-agent orchestration on an infinite canvas, and what resilience and "product taste" mean for designers navigating an era of relentless change.LINKSMicrosoft Copilot 365 Redesignhttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/05/28/introducing-a-new-design-for-microsoft-365-copilot/What “done” means when you’re shipping AI featureshttps://jeffgothelf.com/blog/what-done-means-when-youre-shipping-ai-features/Amazon's new Proteus warehouse robothttps://www.engadget.com/2187338/amazons-new-proteus-warehouse-robot-is-fully-autonomous/Designing how designers master AIhttps://uxdesign.cc/designing-how-designers-master-ai-642d8751d945New Miro Features at Canvas26https://www.youtube.com/live/qM-KxCr4I5I?si=HGtSokg95B9kO5k9
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  Figma and Stitch Updates, Design Memory, Fraude Design, Quilter CEO Sergiy Nesterenko 03.06.2026 1h 5m

  Updates to Figma and Google Stitchhttps://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-codehttps://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stitch-updates/The Design System Advantage is Memoryhttps://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memoryFraude Designhttps://fraude.design/Nik's Interview with CEO of Quilter, Sergiy Nesterenkohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/https://www.quilter.ai/
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  Figma Design Agent, 2026 AI in Design Report, Synthetic Customers, Llewyn Paine on UXR 26.05.2026 58m

  This week we talk about Figma's new design agent integrated right on the canvas, the 2026 State of AI in Design Report, and Bain's experiment with synthetic customers. Then Dan interview Llewyn Paine about the future of UXR and design and gives a preview of the Rosenfeld Designing with AI Conference 2026 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/Show Notes:The Figma Design Agent is Here | Figma BlogState of AI in DesignSynthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes | Bain & Companyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/llewyn/