AI and Design

Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
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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. 1 DAY AGO

    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

  2. 12 MAY

    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

  3. 5 MAY

    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

  4. 28 APR

    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

  5. 21 APR

    Claude Design, Innovative AI and Design Research from CHI 2026

    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.

    56 min

  6. 14 APR

    Insights from Anthropic's Head of Design, Why AI UX Sucks, AI Aesthetics, Human-Centered Design 2.0

    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

    30 min

  7. 7 APR

    Deep Dive: The Future of Design Practice and Process (with author Mike Kuniavsky)

    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/

    54 min

  8. 31 MAR

    Claude Computer Use, Product Intuition, Author Chris Noessel ("Designing Assistant Technology")

    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

    42 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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    Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
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  • Episodes
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    © 2026 Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
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    AI and Design

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