AI and Design

Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Design
  • Updated Weekly

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.

  1. Jun 16

    Siri AI, A New Interaction-Focused AI Lab, Four Design AI Jobs, Perplexity Computer Research

    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

    30 min

  2. Jun 10

    Copilot Redesign, Is AI ever Done, Amazon Proteus, Miro's Head of AI Design Mark Boyes-Smith

    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

    1h 3m

  3. Jun 3

    Figma and Stitch Updates, Design Memory, Fraude Design, Quilter CEO Sergiy Nesterenko

    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/

    1h 6m

  4. May 26

    Figma Design Agent, 2026 AI in Design Report, Synthetic Customers, Llewyn Paine on UXR

    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/

    59 min

  5. May 19

    AI Originality, Bolt-on AI, Special Guest: Fin's VP of Product Design Thom Rimmer

    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

    58 min

  6. May 12

    Cognitive Surrender, Speed isn't The Bottleneck, and special guest PM Thomas Groendal

    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

    57 min

  7. May 5

    Agent Users, New Design Team Structures, Team Dynamics, AI Chat Problems, Constraints Not Prompts

    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 Agent12:23 Rethinking the Shape of Design Teams in AI World17:03 The Impact of AI Efficiency on Team Interactions24:39 The Forgotten Conversation Problem in AI31:14 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

    42 min

  8. Apr 28

    Deep Dive: AI Skills (with Google's MC Dean)

    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

    48 min
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About

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.

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  • Creator
    Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
  • Years Active
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  • Episodes
    23
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    © 2026 Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
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    AI and Design

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