Two Carnegie Mellon faculty explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of design. Each week, we'll break down the latest AI developments, dive deep into AI topics that matter to designers, and talk with fascinating guests who are right at the intersection of these fields. All views expressed are our own and not reflective of Carnegie Mellon or the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
Deep Dive: 2026 Figma AI Report with Figma's Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston
46 min
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%). LINKS Figma's 2026 AI Report — blog post Full report / download Report microsite Andrew Hogan on LinkedIn Andrew Hogan, "AI Fluency Isn't the Finish Line" Shane Johnston on LinkedIn
Training Taste, AI Systems Thinking, LLM Counter Defaults, and special guest Dan Maccarone
55 min
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=web LLM Counter-Defaults by Nadia Piet / AIxDESIGN https://counterdefaults.aixdesign.co/ Thinking in Systems book https://amzn.to/4wuNA6o How Buildings Learn book https://amzn.to/4g2Y99V "Never mind the prompts, here's the thinking" https://uxdesign.cc/never-mind-the-prompts-heres-the-thinking-f4af4b92155f Charming Robot https://charmingrobot.com Story in a Bottle podcast https://storyinabottle.charmingrobot.com/ The Barstool MBA (Audible) https://amzn.to/4pGRZ3q Fool's Gold, NYC https://www.foolsgoldnyc.com/ MHCI Capstone sponsorship https://hcii.cmu.edu/academics/mhci/capstone
Bye Bye Purple Gradients: OpenAI's Design Push. Plus special guests: fuguUX
48 min
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. LINKS Design Arena https://www.designarena.ai/ GPT 5.6 Sol topping the design leaderboard https://notes.designarena.ai/how-openais-sol-finally-learned-design-taste/ Codex Micro https://openai.com/supply/co-lab/work-louder/ Figma Make + OpenAI integration announcement https://www.figma.com/blog/gpt-5-6-is-now-available-in-figma-make/ fuguUX https://www.fuguux.com/
2026 Thus Far: 7 Big Themes
49 min
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. LINKS Scraped Styles MD repository https://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 Challenge https://www.linkedin.com/learning/aaron-draplin-takes-on-a-logo-design-challenge How tech workers are feeling in 2026 https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026 Why using AI leads to Brain Fry https://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry
Claude Design 2.0, Quality Bars, Layers of AI Experience, Perplexity Brain
37 min
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-problem MC Dean, "Who Sets the Quality Bar?": https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/who-sets-the-quality-bar Emily Campbell, "Layers of AI Experience": https://emilycampbell.co/writing/layers-of-ai-experience Perplexity, "Self-Improving Memory for Agents" (Brain): https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/self-improving-memory-for-agents Dave Song, "Control over Context" — user-led memory management concepts: https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/control-over-context-44d975e92efc Dan's upcoming novel, The Restoration (D.S. Duffy): https://dsduffy.com/
Hot Takes and Big Themes from Config 2026
54 min
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.
Siri AI, A New Interaction-Focused AI Lab, Four Design AI Jobs, Perplexity Computer Research
30 min
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. LINKS Secret AI Lab News https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-plans-to-start-a-new-ai-company The Four Design Jobs AI Created (So Far) https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-jobs-ai-created/ Perplexity/HBS Research https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07489 Thinking Machines Demo Video https://youtu.be/A12AVongNN4?si=ODvSCf9IKTzwBiiU
Copilot Redesign, Is AI ever Done, Amazon Proteus, Miro's Head of AI Design Mark Boyes-Smith
1 hr 3 min
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. LINKS Microsoft Copilot 365 Redesign https://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 features https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/what-done-means-when-youre-shipping-ai-features/ Amazon's new Proteus warehouse robot https://www.engadget.com/2187338/amazons-new-proteus-warehouse-robot-is-fully-autonomous/ Designing how designers master AI https://uxdesign.cc/designing-how-designers-master-ai-642d8751d945 New Miro Features at Canvas26 https://www.youtube.com/live/qM-KxCr4I5I?si=HGtSokg95B9kO5k9
Figma and Stitch Updates, Design Memory, Fraude Design, Quilter CEO Sergiy Nesterenko
1 hr 5 min
Updates to Figma and Google Stitch https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-code https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stitch-updates/ The Design System Advantage is Memory https://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memory Fraude Design https://fraude.design/ Nik's Interview with CEO of Quilter, Sergiy Nesterenko https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/ https://www.quilter.ai/
Figma Design Agent, 2026 AI in Design Report, Synthetic Customers, Llewyn Paine on UXR
58 min
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 Blog State of AI in Design Synthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes | Bain & Company https://www.linkedin.com/in/llewyn/
AI Originality, Bolt-on AI, Special Guest: Fin's VP of Product Design Thom Rimmer
58 min
When you collaborate with AI on a piece of work, whose thinking is it, really? That question runs underneath what a lot of designers and creatives are arguing about right now, and this week on AI and Design, Nik and Dan dig in. We start with Giorgio Schirò's "The thinking was never just mine," which uses Andy Clark and David Chalmers' "extended mind" theory to argue that creativity has always been distributed: our taste comes from books, films, teachers, and a thousand inputs we don't normally count. AI doesn't invent this loop; it just makes it faster and leaves receipts. Then we turn to Revanth Krishna's "Don't Simply Bolt On AI, Rethink From the Ground Up," using Anthropic's new Claude for Small Business as a worked example of what AI-native enterprise software might actually look like — and what trust and brand mean when the AI inside your tool isn't built by the company whose name is on the box. Our guest is Thom Rimmer, VP of Product Design at Fin. Thom tells the story of how his company decided, over a single weekend in late 2022, to bet the entire business on AI and rebuild from the ground up. We get into what that did to the org: 95% of PRs now authored by Claude Code, designers shipping production code, the design system's source of truth moving from Figma to markdown files, and what's left of the design job when the artifacts get cheap. LINKS UI for AI https://uiforai.design The Thinking Was Never Just Mine https://uxdesign.cc/the-thinking-was-never-just-mine-9b73cc04c837 Don’t simply bolt on AI. Rethink from the ground up. https://uxdesign.cc/dont-simply-bolt-on-ai-rethink-from-the-ground-up-ae73a9093cd2 Introducing Claude for Small Business https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business Operator https://fin.ai/operator
Cognitive Surrender, Speed isn't The Bottleneck, and special guest PM Thomas Groendal
57 min
Wharton researchers fed people AI-generated answers, half of them deliberately wrong. The participants accepted them 73% of the time — and their confidence went up. They're calling it "cognitive surrender." Nik and Dan dig into what separates it from plain old cognitive offloading, and the design moves that might pull people back. Then: Ethan Ding's "Claude Code Is Not Making Your Product Better," and why taste, not coding speed, is the bottleneck for product quality. Finally, Tom Groendal, Senior Product Manager at CACI's DarkBlue Intelligence Group, on what AI actually looks like inside a working product team: melting role boundaries, a "product brain" repo that doubles as institutional memory, and the new role that keeps surfacing in conversation after conversation — the context manager. LINKS Thinking - Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646 Cognitive Surrender https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/ Creative Tools: The Case for Keeping AI Unfinished https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/creative-tools-the-case-for-keeping-ai-unfinished-80c601821b53 claude code is not making your product better https://ethanding.substack.com/p/claude-code-is-not-making-your-product Obviously Awesome (book) https://amzn.to/433nIkR
Agent Users, New Design Team Structures, Team Dynamics, AI Chat Problems, Constraints Not Prompts
42 min
Dan and Nik talk about how to design for your next user being an agent, the impact of AI on team structure and dynamics, the challenge of memory and recall in conversation-based AI systems, and the shift towards AI experience design focused on constraints, not prompts. Chapters 00:00 Your Next User is an Agent 12:23 Rethinking the Shape of Design Teams in AI World 17:03 The Impact of AI Efficiency on Team Interactions 24:39 The Forgotten Conversation Problem in AI 31:14 The End of Prompting: AI Experience Design with Constraints LINKS Your product has a new user. It’s not human. https://www.elenaverna.com/p/your-product-has-a-new-user-its-not Rethinking the shape of design teams in an AI world https://uxdesign.cc/rethinking-the-shape-of-design-teams-in-an-ai-world-82f986bf9a27 The “Bug-Free” Workforce: How AI Efficiency Is Subtly Disrupting The Interactions That Build Strong Teams https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/bug-free-workforce-ai-disrupting-teams/ The forgotten conversation problem in AI chat https://uxdesign.cc/the-forgotten-conversation-problem-in-ai-chat-4d3d0c3ea525 The End of Prompting: Why the Future of AI Experience Design Is Constraint-First https://uxmag.com/articles/the-end-of-prompting-why-the-future-of-ai-experience-design-is-constraint-first
Deep Dive: AI Skills (with Google's MC Dean)
47 min
Google's MC Dean, the author of over 100 AI skills for designers on everything from accessibility to moods, joins Nik and Dan to talk about Skills: how to make them, how to use them, and what the future of them could be. LINKS MC Dean on Substack https://marieclairedean.substack.com/ MC Dean on Github https://github.com/owl-listener Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman book https://amzn.to/4sYGQek
Claude Design, Innovative AI and Design Research from CHI 2026
55 min
Surprise surprise, Dan and Nik talk about Anthropic's launch of Claude Design. The Nik does a set of rapid-fire interviews from the 2026 CHI conference, featuring the latest HCI research in AI and Design.
Insights from Anthropic's Head of Design, Why AI UX Sucks, AI Aesthetics, Human-Centered Design 2.0
30 min
Dan checks out a Fast Company interview with Anthropic's Head of Design Joel Lewenstein and finds reasons for hope. Dmitry Kargaev points out the flaws of AI UX and has some reasons for why is happens. A catalog of AI brand archetypes, and Dan applauds Patrizia Bertini's call to rethink Human-Centered Design to be less about "users" and more about "citizens." Links: Fast Company Interview with Joel Lewenstein https://www.fastcompany.com/91519289/inside-anthropics-biggest-design-choices AI Products Have Terrible UX: Here's Why https://hackernoon.com/ai-products-have-terrible-ux-heres-why Aesthetics of AI https://www.acolorbright.com/en/insights/aesthetics-of-ai Human-Centred Design has grown up. It’s time we did too https://uxdesign.cc/human-centred-design-has-grown-up-it-is-time-we-did-too-766601c1fc7d We're All Doing The Same Job Now https://odannyboy.medium.com/were-all-doing-the-same-job-now-81924e0c80d6 The Existential Designer https://odannyboy.medium.com/the-existential-designer-facilitating-meaning-through-interaction-8952c358ec52
Deep Dive: The Future of Design Practice and Process (with author Mike Kuniavsky)
54 min
Dan, Nik, and special guest Mike Kuniavsky ("Observing the User Experience") do a deep dive into the impact of AI on the traditional design practice and process. They get into the disappearing/evolving role of design artifacts, the influence of AI on design literacy, and the reevaluation of the design process in the age of AI. AI has triggered the democratization of design tools, a shift in organizational power dynamics, and ofttimes the complete disregard for of unknown unknowns. They also explore the changing product risk surface, the redefinition of scale in design practice, and the role of synthetic users in user-centered design. LINKS: Mike's article "Design practice assumes a world that no longer exists: what’s next?" https://medium.com/@mikekuniavsky/design-practice-assumes-a-world-that-no-longer-exists-whats-next-ca3f588ad4d8 Other recent articles on Design Process: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-process-isnt-dead/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-process-isnt-dead/ https://medium.com/@kristian.bjornhaug/the-design-process-isnt-dead-but-ai-is-changing-where-design-happens-220dce1b3acd https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/the-new-design-process-2-6-2b5967507263 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/design-process-isnt-dead-its-only-thing-save-us-rick-starbuck-7pbmc/ “Cognitive surrender” leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/research-finds-ai-users-scarily-willing-to-surrender-their-cognition-to-llms/
Claude Computer Use, Product Intuition, Author Chris Noessel ("Designing Assistant Technology")
42 min
Dan and Nik talk about Anthropic's latest announcement about computer use and its impact on how designers design screens. Then they discuss the article " AI didn't kill product intuition. It exposed who never had it." Author Chris Noessel stops by to talk about his new book Designing Assistant Technology and the challenges and considerations in designing AI to assist users. The conversation touches on the risks of descaling and over-reliance, and cthe importance of keeping cognitive engagement in AI design. https://amzn.to/414zOta https://www.productparty.us/p/ai-didnt-kill-product-intuition-it
Google Stitch, 2026 Design in Tech Report, Downloadable Design Skills
52 min
Dan and Nik offer opinions on Google Stitch, a new design tool that just dropped from Google Labs. They also dig deep into John Maeda's 2026 Design in Tech report, debating his key insights for designers in the evolving landscape of AI and design. Lastly, a discussion on the codification, sharing and future of downloadable design skills. Google Stitch: https://stitch.withgoogle.com/ Design in Tech 2026: https://designintech.report/ MC Dean's Skills: https://substack.com/@marieclairedean/p-190232071 and https://substack.com/@marieclairedean/p-190956350
AI Image Editors, Institutional v Individual AI, Author Louise MacFadyen ("Designing AI Interfaces")
53 min
Nik and Dan talk about new AI image editing tools from Canva and Adobe and the value of baking AI right into existing tools. The conversation switches to a provocative new essay by George Sivulka on the importance of Institutional AI and not just Individual AI, which can be chaotic if it's not coordinated. https://x.com/gsivulka/status/2031797989908627849 Lastly, Dan interviews Louise Macfadyn, author of the upcoming book Designing AI Interfaces. https://amzn.to/4lAf9qi
Apple Podcasts rankings supplied by Mato Topic Intelligence Platform.
Observed August 1, 2026.
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